Masterlink Interactive Blog

Ok, so my SEO gurus are not going to like my title, but it’s true! Now don’t get me wrong, my SEO Specialists are the BEST and they do an excellent job of getting that wonderfully sought after target audience to your website. However, what happens when the user gets to your site? Is it easy to use? Is it compelling for the visitor? Does the web design look professional? Does it look trustworthy? Is it outdated?

A billboard or newspaper advertisement can be used to drive foot traffic to your brick and mortar store, but if the store is dirty, the merchandise is not properly organized and the service is poor, you will not make the sale. The same is true for your website – probably even more so! Whether you are selling a product or a service, your prospective online customer is going to make a judgment about your company before ever talking to a real live person or stepping into that million dollar office you occupy.

That old saying, “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression” was never more relevant than today. If that visitor to your site hits the dreaded “back” button before visiting anything more than your homepage (referred to as the bounce rate), you are dead in the water. They will not be coming back.

Now is a great time to take a retrospective look at your current site and see what can be done to catch those visitors that are coming to the site. Some great ideas for drawing those visitors in might be:

• Incorporate some interesting Flash animation to your site that also provides a valuable message to the user that will entice them to want to learn more. Don’t use movement just to see something move – your visitors do not want to be entertained.
• Prominently place a call to action on your homepage.
• Offer some type of online-only value to the visitor, a special coupon, discount, free evaluation, etc. Make sure this information is front and center when they come to your site.
• This may sound simple, but put your phone number and a contact us button on your homepage – users do not want to hunt for that information.
• The homepage should be clean and clutter-free – don’t have too many messages fighting for attention.
• Make sure the content is fresh and new – add a press release, new blog posting.
• Remove any annoying music, sound or auto-launching video.
• Employ a tagline that tells the user exactly what you do – no “cutesy” or “creative” taglines.
• If your site looks like it was designed more than 2 years ago – START OVER.

We have seen conversion rates as high as 30% on sites that are well designed with great SEO that really targets the correct visitor. Even if you are getting conversions with your current site, study your online statistics – you could be missing out on a lot of potential new business.

When you aim for perfection, you discover it’s a moving target. ~George Fisher

Don’t let your desire for perfection get in the way of your marketing goals. Being hesitant and indecisive when forming ideas for your interactive marketing strategy can waste a lot of valuable time. It can also cost you some valuable leads that you would be generating if you had just committed to getting it up and running. Time is money, and the more time you spend not having an effective online marketing solution, the less money you are going to be making.

Some people will spend months or years polishing a business plan, making sure every single detail is examined and estimated, only to find that in practice, it’s not as they imagined it. That’s way too much time wasted planning and thinking, when they should have be doing and learning.

The same is true about your Interactive Marketing Solution. You know that you need to figure something out to stay competitive. All this talk about Web 2.0, corporate blogging, and social media is pretty confusing. It’s scary knowing that you need to do something, yet having no clue on what to do. How can you identify what is right for your company?

Well, the best advice is to let someone (I suggest MasterLink) help you formulate an Interactive Marketing Action Plan. Working with a collaborative Interactive Marketing partner to identify your goals and objectives is a great way to establish what your interactive marketing solution should be. By setting goals, it is then easy to work backwards to discover ways of achieving them. Hey, it turns out you don’t need that corporate blog or the fancy 3-d flash intro after all. Nice!

Marketing is an ongoing process. You discover that your favorite campaigns are not quite as effective as you planned, or that the one you had no hopes for, surprisingly has a high conversion rate. Because the nature of marketing is so volatile, the best strategy is to get it going and just test, tweak, test, tweak, test, etc.

You can come up with millions of excuses not to get a website up, not to set up a Pay-Per-Click campaign to drive traffic to your company’s product pages, or not to start utilizing Search Engine Optimization to increase your business’ online visibility and credibility. Stop it! Quit making excuses.

Your best option is to start right now before your competition leaves you in their dust. When you spend so much time looking for the “best” choice that you never actually do anything, you are sabotaging your company.

Even if the target is moving, it still is best to shoot. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.