When you are spending good money on your marketing and advertising, how do you know if you are making money?

Websites


Your website has the potential to be the most important, most powerful sales and marketing tool you have.

Your website should be the hub of all your sales and marketing, and when properly utilized, will help you:

  • Generate leads
  • Educate leads and move them through the sales funnel toward purchase
  • Deliver various information about your products and services
  • Process orders
  • Cross sell-and up-sell
  • Run web only special promotions
  • Communicate with existing customers
  • Communicate with distribution channels
  • Generate publicity
  • Streamline customer service
  • Track marketing and provide metrics on conversions

The last example “Track marketing and provide metrics on conversions” is huge in and of itself. When you place an ad in a magazine, you can’t track who calls you unless you ask “where did you hear about us?” The major problem with this is: your employees will forget to ask after about 2 days. A week after you tell them they have to ask, they will be back to doing it the old way – not asking. In just about every other marketing tactic besides a website there is no way to track the effectiveness of the advertising you are doing.

Your website is the hub of all your marketing

Your website is the hub of all your marketing. All of the marketing you do should lead back to it!


To be fair, there is a couple ways to track ads, but the most popular way to track an ads response rate is by setting up a special phone number for each ad. This way, when someone calls using that number, you know they got the number from the ad. OR DID THEY? This method is still not foolproof. Phone numbers aren’t new. They are recycled. Depending upon the age of the phone number, 5 – 25% of your calls could be wrong numbers and mis-dials.

On the other hand, your website can have special hidden pages for each ad. This is less expensive than a new phone number. Plus, the new page never existed before, so when someone comes to it, the odds are almost 100% that they came from the ad and it’s tracked automatically by your website.

Another reason you must have a website is to educate and nurture your leads. While it’s true to say that most buyers will review your site before they do business with you, you have to understand the power that using the site to educate has on your bottom line.

When you use your website to educate and inform your prospects, thus bringing them through the sales funnel, your sales reps don’t have to do it. This means they can focus on closing the prospects that are ready, and leave the rest on the tree, that is your website, to ripen by themselves until they are ready to be picked.

Your website, when properly utilized, is extremely powerful in its ability to educate and persuade prospects. It is an extension of your brand that supports your company in many possible ways.

When you develop a website with rich content that integrates with your marketing campaigns, you gain broad and potentially lucrative marketing capabilities.