Inbound Marketing Blueprint-Step 4 Leads

Conversion to get more leads: You’ve done a great job optimizing your website using keywords and your site is getting more traffic, but none of that traffic is leading to any new customers. Now what? It’s simple, now your goal is conversion. Offer your visitors something and convert your visitors into leads. The only way to grow your business is to have something to offer your site visitors.

get more leads

Step 1. Choose Your Offer. 

This is the most important component of any campaign. The offer is what drives everything else. If your offer is unattractive nothing else matters. The offer is designed to start a conversation so that you know what your visitor is interested in. This way when they are ready to make a purchase, you know what to offer them.

If you’re a gym owner you want to create offers that will appeal to a wide array of athletes, each offer is for a different product or service, and knowing what offer has the most appeal is useful in getting to know your website visitors.

Step 2. Create a Call to Action

After you’ve chosen your offer, decide on your call to action. A call to action is an image or button that grabs the attention of your reader and tells them to take an action. The button or image directs them to a landing page (a page with a form to fill out) where they will give you their information. They have now been converted to a lead. If you have an awesome call to action, you’ll have an awesome conversion rate, which means your website will generate more leads.

Step 3. Create a Landing Page. 

Once you’ve decided on your call to action, it’s time to setup the landing page that it will be linked to. Remember, this is the page that converts your visitors into leads. Landing pages house the forms that collect the information from your target market. It should be clean and relevant to the call to action that directed your reader to the page and it should give clear instructions on what they need to do to receive the offer.

Step 4. Test, Measure and Repeat…again and again.

Offers + Calls to Action + Landing Pages = Conversion. What’s important to recognize is that this works exponentially so more is always better. Having a diverse mix of offers allows you to get a better understanding of what your readers are attracted to and it also gives you more conversion opportunities.

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How to Blog and Not Hate Doing It

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One of the main objections that health and fitness professionals have toward blogging is “I don’t have time to blog.” the other is, “I hate to write.”

love to blogCreating content for a blog doesn’t have to come in written form. Engage your target market in the way that’s most authentic to you. If writing a blog isn’t fun for you, it certainly won’t be fun for the reader.

Add Value Any Way You See Fit.

Your blog can be in whatever format you want it to be. As long as you’re sharing valuable and relevant content, no one really cares if you write it, speak it or act it out. Just make it interesting, fun and useful.

As health and fitness professionals, you can have fun interacting with your target market in a variety of ways:

  1. Tape a demonstration and embed it on your website.
  2. Record client testimonials and share them as monthly success stories.
  3. Host a YouTube cooking show as a way to share nutrition tips.
  4. Interview another industry expert and share the transcript and video.
  5. Create a “how-to” video series on a new technique every week.

Your blog is another channel that you can use to reach out and help the people you were meant to help. It’s a simple way to influence those who you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting, but can still provide useful information to. Don’t limit yourself and don’t turn it into a chore.

Consider your blog as a 24 hour extension of yourself, a digital version of you that never gets tired and is always available. Think of the value you can add to your client’s lives.

Download this Blogging Planner template to help you plan your next blog.

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Online Marketing Tools: A Guide for the Service Professional

As a service professional, managing your small business marketing is one of your many responsibilities. With so many tools that measure site visits, tweets and blog subscribers, it’s easy to know that your content or your video was interacted with, but do you understand what the interaction is telling you about your prospect?

Do it yourself marketing tools can’t do it all.

small businessOnline marketing for service professionals has gotten easier with the do-it-yourself tools, but the marketing tools alone are not enough to give you a complete picture of the type of interaction your prospect had on your website. You need a real person, not just computer software, who can analyze not only the content that was consumed, but the level of engagement that may show how your prospect felt about your product, service or industry knowledge.

As a professional service provider looking to grow your business, it is necessary to measure the effectiveness of campaigns, blogs, landing pages, and other lead generation tools, but you should also be looking at the type of interaction that is happening with your brand as well. Discover the way your readers view your brand by building a relationship with them through your content and the value you add to their lives.

It’s more than a numbers game

As a service professional, marketing is the lifeline of your business and handling it smartly, efficiently and cost-effectively is always the goal. Do-it-yourself marketing tools may churn out numbers with nice graphs here and there, but not understanding the information will hinder you from making the most of it.

Engagement is a conversation and that conversation can’t be one-sided or left up to interpretation by a machine.

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Step 3 of 8: Creating Your 2011 Inbound Marketing Blueprint

Optimize your website: So you’ve got your keyword and content strategy done and you want to make the most out of the words you’ve chosen and increase your website’s chances of ranking for those keywords. Search Engine Optimization is the way to do this. It’s a fancy way of saying you want to make the best use of your keywords in order to get found when a potential client searches Google, Bing or yahoo for one of the keywords you chose in Step 2.

search engine optimizationYour inbound marketing goal is to be on the first page or in the first few search engine results for your keyword or keyword phrase. Your content should be written around your keywords, but still focused on the needs of your customer in a language they would understand. It’s in your best interest to learn at least the basics of SEO in order to make the most of your website.

There are two types of SEO, on-page SEO –– how well your website presents itself to the search engines and off-page SEO –– your clout or reputation (what other websites say about you as a website) on the web, and the amount of pages indexed by the search engines. Your on-page SEO can be improved right away by taking the correct steps, however your off-page SEO takes a little more time to improve.

The first three steps to improving your on-page SEO are:

  1. Page title
  2. Meta descriptions
  3. Integrating keywords in your content

Page titles are important to your on-page SEO strength. Page titles are found at the top of your browser window and depending on what type of browser you use, it’s the name of the tab or open window. The page title is also the title of a page shown in search engines.

Here are a few tips to come up with a good page title:

  • Put keywords and keyword phrases as close to the beginning of the title as you can.
  • Use a different page title for each page. Give yourself as many opportunities as possible to target different keywords.
  • Make it readable. Not only for search engines, but for your site visitors. What good is it if you get found, but no one can understand what you’re saying?

The next step to on-page SEO is to write a unique meta description for each of your pages. Meta description is the text search engines see as the description of your website and each indexed page. It doesn’t affect search engine rankings directly, but it does let a searcher know what your site is about and can be used to pull them in.

Integrating keywords within your website content is one of the main on-page SEO improvements you can make. This does not mean keyword stuffing, but it doesn’t mean focusing on specific words that you want to be searched for and ensuring that you use these words within your content.

Off-page SEO is more difficult to achieve and it amounts to nearly 75% of your search engine optimization value. The only way to really improve your off-page SEO is by having more relevant pages i on your website that are indexed by the search engines. And the only way to do that is to consistently create remarkable content that is relevant to your potential clients and reaffirms to the search engines that your site is about what you say it is about.

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Choose the Right Goals to Help Business Grow

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plan for successThere are many great quotes that reiterate how important a well-crafted plan is to success.  If you choose the right goals from the beginning, you can help your business grow immensely.

“A good plan is like a roadmap, it shows the final destination and usually the best way to get there” -H. Stanley Judd.

As service professionals, it is a must that your marketing is planned ahead. If you haven’t already, write down one or two BIG marketing goals that you have this year. Writing down what you’d like to have accomplished by the end of the year, is a good way to outline your to-do’s for the months ahead.

As a small business owner it’s easy to let the day to day operation of your business get in the way of the planning process. However, you’ve got to make time to plan your marketing. Smart service professionals are able to maintain a fluid client base because they don’t market themselves in cycles, it’s an ongoing practice. Deciding on one or two BIG goals to execute will lead to many little goals being accomplished in the process.

Time to measure up

Your BIG goals should be concrete and it should be easy to tell if you’re on track or not. For example, “blog more frequently”, or “promote products via social media campaigns” are concrete goals that are easy to keep track of. Whereas “nurture business relationships”, is a squishy goal with no real measurability. You should be able to write down your one or two BIG goals and chart out month by month how you will go about accomplishing them.

For instance, the goal to blog more frequently would begin with creating a content strategy plan. Once that’s done, you would begin creating content either all at once on a selected day or daily, whichever works best with your schedule. It would be wise to develop a content calendar that would help you stay on a consistent publishing schedule.

Bass-ackwards wins the race

Backwards planning is the simplest way to break your BIG marketing goals down into manageable pieces. Start with the end and break down how each step would be accomplished. Do this now while the year is still new because before you know it, it’ll be August.

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Why Service Professionals Should Use Internet Marketing

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Internet marketing is used by smart business owners who understand the power of inbound marketing strategies. free traffic sources using internet marketingInbound marketing strategies give service professionals a clear, measurable way to get more clients and build a sustainable business. It has proven to be a more cost-effective way to boost search engine rankings, generate quality leads and drive website traffic.

According to the 2011 State of Inbound Marketing a report published by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company:

Inbound Marketing Continues to be the Low-Cost Advantage 

Businesses that spent half or more of their marketing budget on inbound marketing activities spent 62% less per lead than businesses spending half or more of their marketing budget on outbound channels (direct mail, billboards, radio and TV ads).

Blogs and Social Media Are Legitimate Lead Generators. 

Blogs and social media are leveling the marketing playing field. According to a survey done by HubSpot of 644 professionals familiar with the marketing of their business, 57% of businesses that use a blog stated that they were able to generate leads from that blog that turned into customers.

Service professionals who do not blog are in minority in the business community

According to the survey from 2009-2011 businesses with blogs grew from 48% to 65%. Businesses who have blogs consider it to be an integral part of their marketing mix.

Blogs, social media and organic search remain the least expensive method of lead generation.

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A Common Marketing Mistake Made by Most Service Professionals

Like most service professionals, you spend the majority of your time finding clients and the rest of your time, serving the clients you’ve been fortunate enough to find. You are in business to help people; the problem is you are unable to spend most of your time doing what you love to do because you spend so much time trying to find clients to serve. Avoiding this common marketing mistake made by many service professionals, can prove useful in freeing up more of your time to serve your clients.

create a website strategyMany service professionals have a poor website strategy or no website strategy at all. Your only focus on your website was while it was being designed, but after it was finished you haven’t paid much attention to it. And some service professionals haven’t even bothered to have a website, eliminating them from the competition altogether. However in this internet savvy day and age, having a website is a start, but it’s not enough to convince a potential client to work with you. This is where having a website strategy will set you apart from your competition. Strategically using your website as a lead-generating tool is a key factor in maintaining the flow of clients that you want for your business. The first step in creating this strategy is knowing what you want your prospective client to do when they get to your website and the next step is having something to offer them for doing what you want.

For example, you may want them to sign up for your blog or monthly online newsletter. Have a form on your front page and a call to action button that tells them what you want them to do and ask them to sign. In return for signing up (and giving you their name and/or email address) you could offer a download of something you know they may find useful like a video demonstrating the value your clients receive from working with you, or a coupon for a small percentage off their initial consult or service.

The ideas are limitless, but always remember to provide a ton of value to your prospects (and your current clients) and your website will generate leads on a continuous basis.

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Need More Clients: Four Tips to Grow Your Business

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Grow Your Business Entrepid IncThere are few service professionals today who don’t need more clients. Here are four ways that can help you grow your business.

Automate and create systems. 

Having a system in place from the start helps your clients to trust you more. From infants to seniors, human beings like to operate within the parameters of a routine. When your clients know what to expect from you, the consistency becomes a sense of security. According to Michael Port, author of Book Yourself Solid, there are six major systems categories in just about every business:

  •  Financial systems
  •  Administrative systems
  •  Communication systems
  •  Sales systems
  •  Marketing systems
  •  Client support systems

If you don’t have a system in place for how you’re managing the above categories it’s time to put one into place. If you already have a system in place, make sure it’s written down even if you’re the only one who uses it. If you can’t explain what you’re doing to someone else then you really don’t know what you’re doing and your success will be difficult to repeat and your failure difficult to avoid.

Develop Consistent and measurable marketing

When service professionals need more clients, most throw their money into the marketing wishing well. Toss some at direct mail, a little more at making flyers, and even more at a radio ad, then they wait to see what happens. Sure you might get a few leads from one of those tactics, but how systematic is that? What good is your marketing if you can’t determine its success?

As we discussed above, create a system to grow your business. Yes, even for your marketing. When there is a system in place you can measure how successful a specific action was, and if it worked well, it’s repeatable, if not, you’re able to figure out what went wrong and fix it. Creating a consistent and measurable marketing system is key solution if you need more clients.

Give your website a makeover. 

A need for more clients often trumps the need for urgency in making your website presentable, but let’s looks at the logic in that. If I’m in need of a service you offer, and I somehow stumble upon your website, it’s the first impression I’m going to have of your professionalism and quality of service. If your website is outdated and difficult to navigate, I may discredit you as a solution to my problem and look to one of your competitors.

When you need more clients, attending to your website is a necessity. If you don’t have a website, you’re invisible to most people searching to do business with you. Part of your consistent and measurable marketing system should consist of giving your website a makeover.

Commit to blogging. 

A blog on your website is a necessity to grow your business, whether you need more clients or not. Every business can benefit from having a blog. Blogs give prospective clients a chance to get to know a little about you and determine if you can meet their needs. It also makes your site look better to the search engines and gives other websites who are looking to connect a place to link to when you have something to offer their target market.

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Why Fitness and Wellness Professionals Are Invisible Online

Gone are the days of the Yellow Pages. Can you remember the last time you looked-up something in the phone book? Neither can your clients. The internet has made the phone book an endangered species. So, if you’re not findable by your prospective clients when they Google “fitness and wellness professionals” you don’t exist to them.

The first step to getting found as a service professional is to create a dynamic online presence. And the fastest most effective way to create that presence is to start a blog.

Why is blogging effective for fitness and wellness professionals?
Short answer––a blog makes the search engines happy. Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your website (you do have a website, right?) and the search engines really like the daily content that blogs produce. What this means for you is that by keeping the search engines happy by posting to your blog once a day, you become more visible online.
An effective business blog article attracts and converts visitors into leads
So you’ll know if your blog is effective by the amount of visitors you receive and whether or not you’re able to turn some of your blog traffic into leads. If you want to attract the most ideal potential clients for your business, focus the message of your blog to speak to whoever your ideal client is. Who you’re talking to with your blog is really important in determining its effectiveness as a lead-generating tool.

Maximize the effectiveness of your blog

Hire the right blogger or take a copywriting course. Poor writing will not engage your potential client base. It may actually scare them off. Having someone on staff or using an outside expert may increase the effectiveness of your blog

Blog frequently. A study done by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company, found that 90 percent of businesses who blog at least once a day have acquired a customer from their blog.

Use your social media networks to promote your blog. When you post your blog, let everyone know. Tweet it, post it to your Facebook page, publish it to LinkedIn, just be sure that you’re getting the word out that you’re blogging.

Write engaging and relevant content. This may seem like a given, but it’s so important it bears repeating. Know who you intend to connect with and what you want to say to them. Who are you aiming to engage? If your target audience is middle-aged men who want to look 25 again, then your message should speak to them in their language.

Blogging is one of the most effective ways for fitness and wellness professionals to establish themselves as experts in the industry.

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