Thursday, August 12, 2010

Don't drive traffic to your website unless you intend to do something with it!

We all have heard about the definition of insanity. Let me throw a new one out there. It is spending time time writing blog, designing a website, participating in discussion forum and not focusing on lead generation or lead conversion.

I am amazed by how little focus is spent on these two critical aspects of online marketing strategies! It is like going to play football without a playbook! You need to first design your calls to action in your website, you need to observe performance and measure results. Then you need to change, refine and improve that very process on a continuous basis. It should be at a minimum a weekly task.

Think about a retail store (your website is a like retail space!), and that store owner creates creative adds, enticing offers and has a beautiful design inside. The customers are wowed but once they have been in the store they realize that the staff is not up to par, not responsive or they simply don't greet you a way that is engaging. The likely outcome is that you leave without buying anything. Everything has worked, until it matters most! This could be equated to not picking up your phones or not responding to leads timely. It could also be responding to leads with a very generic, "canned" form.

So let's take a moment and look at our playbook, let's focus on the plays when we are within 10 yards of a touchdown (a touchdown here is getting a lead engaged in conversation). The 90 yards already traveled mean absolutely nothing unless you have a way to convert!

This post was written by Frédéric Guitton of activSalesAgent. Frédéric moved from France in 1996 and joined activSalesAgent in 2009 to introduce a live chat solution for the real estate industries. Frédéric's expertise is in Internet engagement processes, Web analytics and customer follow-ups.