The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [83]
So, effectively, we moved from a site where only one of 52,000 visitors went on to our recommended next step, to the shy yes site with 10,000 visits and 74 to 222 people going on to our recommended next step. With one fifth the traffic, we are getting at least 74 times the results. That’s a pretty good improvement and shows that the soft yes site that offers only one choice for how to proceed is an effective tool for driving leads. Companies should have sites like this that are specifically designed to capture leads. Or on your main site you need to make the lead-capture effort your most prominent graphic or offer.
The Web Site
Web sites suffer the same problem as most brochures. They are mostly ego pieces touting your greatness. In contrast, a Web site that offers information of value to your prospects can be a community, a place where your prospects go to look at new things, to get information, to interact with you, and to get to know you better. Have free articles, free education, free sound bites, and free insights. Once prospects have registered with your shy yes page, connect them to the rest of your world with a follow-up email or with a click-through at some point after the shy yes page. Remember, the goal is to create a marketing program in which all the pieces work together like a finely tuned machine. So your Web site should look very much like your brochure and direct mail pieces, using the same graphics, headlines, and market data from your core story.
As you learned in Chapter Four, I don’t care what kind of product or ser vice you offer, there is information that can be of value to your prospects that can soup up your ability to spread your fame and advance your brand. The information on your Web site will get search engines to send you even more leads. Then once folks come to your Web site because it has information of value to them, you can then go a step further and offer Web seminars and mass teleconferences to teach folks how to be more successful in the area in which they live that intersects with your product or ser vice. This will get you even deeper with your prospects. So think of your Web site as a community where there are benefits to your prospects when they visit.
When I was in the advertising business, I used to offer free seminars to advertisers about how to create better ads (the material in this chapter being the content). That was not so long ago, but since then the Internet has ballooned to major significance. If I were selling advertising today, I’d have that seminar online. Think of how this cuts down on your travel expenses. I used to fly all over creation to deliver those seminars. And appointments were harder to get.
The education-based marketing concept that you learned in Chapter Four works hand in glove with the ability to do things over the Internet. Here’s the pitch I’d do today: “How would you like to learn to make your advertising literally 10 times more effective? And you can do it right from the comfort of your favorite office chair.” It’s hard to resist such an offer.
There are many examples I could give you to flesh out the model of turning your Web site into a community. The examples below are simple and some are even silly, but each shows how far this concept can go and how it helps you capture more leads and build a better brand.
If you sell water (as a mundane example), you could have a site with “Everything you wanted to know about water” or “Everything you’d better know about water.” This site could then show all the things that water does for the body. It could explain why you need to drink water, how much water you should drink, what the status of water is on the planet, what the different additives are in the water we drink today, and what’s happening to our tap water today. Now when you’re advertising your water, you can send folks to your site to learn “The five most dangerous things every one should know about water today.” Put that little plug on every bottle of water that you sell, in every ad that you have, and