A few weeks ago I got a call from a small business owner. He had commissioned a local graphic design company to design a website for his business and it had been running for about 3 months. The reason for his call was that he wanted to find out why the website wasn’t generating any calls or emails.
We analysed his website server logs and found that they contained only 12 unique IP addresses and 21 http page requests. In simple terms, nobody was visiting the site. I suspect that the 12 unique IP addresses were his mother and friends.
But where had the client gone wrong? The same place that that 95% of small business owners go wrong. They focus on the drill and not the holes. The client really wanted business leads but that wasn’t the specific object of his project. I’m sure he never told his web designer that the sole purpose of the site was to generate leads, and (as with most small business owners) when the site was finished he thought that the project was over. Well it wasn’t – it had just started!
The most successful internet marketing project that we have ever managed was for a small financial company that wanted to generate business leads. The project produced 15,000 business leads in the first 12 months of operation and from this the client captured 625 new clients. I can’t tell you how much the client made (because I don’t know) but I do know that his lowest priced product was £5,000 and that it wasn’t unusual for somebody to invest £30,000. Do the maths and you will find that the additional revenue was somewhere between £3.1million and £18.8million! The most astounding point is that all of this high value business came from a 1 page website with a few pages of terms and conditions.
The secret to this success was the client. A very forthright chap from Manchester. His focus and his brief were simple:
“I have £5,000 invest and I’m willing to take a punt. I want you to generate as many leads as you can for the 5K and when the project is over we will review the campaign and decide whether we would like to proceed with another campaign.”
Within a year he had spent over £150,000 and in the end the project was getting too big for us so we had to help him to set up his own internal internet marketing team.
Today he uses Search Engines, Banners, Trade Fairs, Radio and TV adverts to bring traffic to his many 1-page websites where he captures the visitor’s details and converts them into business.
The moral: Get a clear focus of what you are trying to achieve and design an integrated program that will meet your goals – even if it’s just a 1 page website.