Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [68]
Exclusion has become easier with the increase of social interactions online. User feedback and ratings have helped immensely as people make decisions online. A February 2009 Jupiter ResearchRichRelevance/BazaarVoice study found that 77 percent of consumers use rating and reviews to make a purchase decision (www.bazaarvoice.com/press-room/39-press/309-pressreleasephpid97).
That also means consumers can be swayed into knowing which products, suppliers, or companies they do not want to do business with. Negative reviews will impact a potential sale or lead, because if searchers see too many negative reviews or comments, they will decide to exclude that vendor or brand from their search.
Decision
The decision is the point that the prospect turns into a customer. At that point, the search they perform is highly targeted. For example, after performing research, a buyer for a digital camera knows for sure that they want a Fuji Finepix J10 that will cost between $115 and $130. From there they will search using that long string of terms and look for retailers offering the best price, terms, and shipping for the price.
The “long tail” terms consist of millions of these refined, deliberate phrases. These phrases are designed to filter out as much unnecessary information and filter in specific required information. They are the results of searchers drilling down into the important information that is critical to their decision making. Once the decision is made, the search terms tend to include features, brand names, and heavily worded phrases, all designed to produce the most relevant specific group of results.
Your Role in the Buying Cycle
To take full advantage of the buying cycle, you need to ensure that your website has content that will persuade searchers based on where they are in the buying cycle. There should be content on your site geared toward the initial focus of need. These are the general-type search phrases that initially present the purpose of your company.
There should also be content that enables searchers to find information they need to develop judgments, draw on comparisons, and find testimonials that help them verbalize and empathize. You want to help your prospects find answers, compare benefits, and refine their information. At the end of the buying cycle, having enough information that allows multiple-word phrases that describe specific benefit statements, targeted questions, and full product titles will enable your website to be much more visible for these very detailed search phrases.
For retailers and business that sell to businesses, it is prime placement to appear in general term searches, research searches, and final decision searches. The reinforcement of brand name and the recurrence of your website will help sway the searcher to use your website as the final decision-making destination.
In addition to evaluating your content based on the buying cycle, the next step is to evaluate the conversions on your website for the buying cycle. I interviewed a company that had estimated a savings of more than $15,000 every year in postal mailing costs. The company evaluated which documents tended to be requested at specific stages of a six- to eight-month buying cycle. In that time, it was able to identify early-stage requests, mid-stage requests, and final-stage requests. By identifying the requests and the typical mailings that went to each prospect, the company could now identify first-contact prospects and estimate what stage of decision those prospects were in by the content they downloaded from the website. In this way, when the sales representative contacted the prospect, he could ask very specific, targeted questions and drive the sale from the downloaded documents; he would not have