Who else wants more clients?
The simple answer to the question is “We all do!”
I’m going to share with you today the concept behind getting more clients. This is not ground-breaking. Lots of people do this. However, it requires an adjustment in mindset if you’re truly going to expand your reach to attract more leads through your website.
It all starts with the digital ecosystem.
What is a “digital ecosystem”?
Just like a physical ecosystem, in which plants, insects, animals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, etc. live and thrive, a digital ecosystem is one in which your business or organisation lives and hopefully thrives.
At the centre of the digital ecosystem is your website. This is the living, beating heart of the system and provides nourishment for everything else.
Around the website live a variety of other things that feed off the content and functionality it provides. These include:
- Social media
- Email newsletters
- Email marketing automation
- Search engine optimisation
- Adwords and PPC
- Social media advertising
Some or all of these will, as in a physical ecosystem, interact with and relate to each other as well, though they are all of them driven by the website, the motor behind the entire system.
So how do I attract more clients?
All of the aforementioned “organisms” in the digital ecosystem are potential partners for your website in attracting more clients.
The most important element in the mix is the first to deal with, however. Your website is of such fundamental importance that not getting it right risks breaking everything else.
When you think about it, social media, newsletters, SEO, adwords, etc. are all designed to drive traffic back to your website. It needs to be in a place where it can best serve the interests of your company or organisation.
Getting your website right
OK, I know I’ve already said it a few times, but I’ll say it again for the sake of completeness: your website is the beating heart of your digital ecosystem. It drives content sharing to the rest of the worldwide web, email newsletters, social media, etc.
Here’s what you need to ensure your site is at its best:
- Fast hosting. If your website is on a slow server or connection, it’s game over. You will lose clickthroughs if your website won’t even load, especially on a smartphone using a 3G connection.
- High quality content. Even more important than a fancy design, if your content isn’t engaging, readers will not come back or even visit you in the first place. Make your content easily readable and geared towards your target audience. Also make sure that you’re producing new content on a regular basis. Your site needs to be indexed by Google and it won’t rank well if there isn’t fresh content appearing regularly.
- Optimised for speed. Your website needs to load fast. (Didn’t I already say that?) It has to be optimised for speed of loading and speed of consumption by the reader. There’s no point in burying your message in paragraph after paragraph of text because the truth is that nobody is going to read it. This goes back to point 2 above. Optimise images as well, because they’re the biggest memory and bandwidth hog usually.
- Calls to action. Make sure every page or post has a really obvious call to action related to the main content. Don’t confuse readers with a plethora of options. Keep it simple and your message will get where it needs to.
- Simple design. It’s far too tempting to add fancy graphics, videos, and carousels or sliders. Don’t do it. Unless there’s a really compelling reason, stick with a simple, elegant, effective design that doesn’t get in the way of delivering your message. After all, unless you’re a designer, the design is probably of secondary importance to the overall need to get the marketing message across.
If there is even a shred of truth to what I’ve said, you can verify it in Google Analytics by looking at the bounce rate. If you have a high bounce rate, the chances are that something is wrong with one or more of these five things.
Of course, if you’re not getting the volume of leads you’d expect, that can also be down to the way your offer appears to the viewer. Usually this signifies that something doesn’t resonate because if you have a killer product or service and people just aren’t buying or subscribing to it, that’s almost always due to the wording, the pricing, or both.
What can I do to enhance things?
Remember this list?
- Social media
- Email newsletters
- Email marketing automation
- Search engine optimisation
- Adwords and PPC
- Social media advertising
This is where these peripheral creatures live. They feed off the website by sharing the content you have diligently prepared and produced, allowing you to drive traffic back to your site to consume more and hopefully generate leads.
Social media
This is often the one most people leap to first. It has a low barrier to entry because setting up an account on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. is completely free of charge. However, cost can be measured in more than merely financial terms. There is a risk that has to be managed by protecting your reputation and damaged reputations are often irreparable.
This is where it really pays for you to have a professional on board. Get a trained pair of eyes to give your social media accounts a thorough going over to ensure brand consistency and that everything is set up correctly. You’d be amazed how many little things can be overlooked.
Of course, if you’re looking to outsource, social media has a low barrier to entry in terms of fee structure, as it usually works out less expensive to get a good following or to advertise and solicit clickthroughs than with other options, such as pay-per-click (PPC) and adwords.
Email newsletters
Here’s another popular option. Don’t be fooled into thinking that social media is where it’s at. Email isn’t dead. Not at all.
In fact, if you’re targeting older readers, they tend to read email far more than jump onto Facebook. Email newsletters are still an incredibly powerful way of getting a readership and attracting incoming leads.
You should aim to create a publishing schedule and ensure that you stick to regular content production. This is where having a blog on your website comes in handy because you can easily repurpose content and use it to share on social networks and in newsletters.
Go for a good balance of curated (shared content from other people) and created content. About 80%/20% should do it.
Email marketing automation
Not to be confused with newsletters, email marketing automation is all about drip-feeding content to people who sign up for a lead magnet. They’ve expressed an interest, so this is your way of getting them more of what interests them and proving you know your stuff, so you’re someone they should like, trust, and do business with.
Email marketing automation is something many companies are investing in because it consistently produces outstanding results in terms of conversions. Yet another reason why email is far from dead.
Search engine optimisation
Now we are into three-figure sums on a monthly basis. SEO isn’t cheap because it requires a huge amount of work to be done behind the scenes, creating backlinks to your website from elsewhere on the Internet, ensuring that your site ranks well with Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others.
Engaging a firm to handle SEO should reap rewards in terms of keyword recognition, content optimisation, and, of course, higher Google rankings, which is what just about everyone expects from it.
Just be aware that just as with social media, SEO works best over time, so you will need to keep this going for a minimum 3-month engagement to see best results.
Adwords and PPC
Paid advertising is always an option and has been since the dawn of printing. It’s no different with the Internet, so you have the choice of Google Adwords and other pay-per-click services.
In all honesty, don’t expect to go into adwords or PPC unless you have a significant budget to throw at it. You won’t see a good return on your investment unless you’re prepared to spend a good £1000 per month, so it’s not for the faint-hearted.
The returns can be spectacular, but clearly you need the economies of scale to drive an advertising spend north of a grand a month.
Social media advertising
Depending on the channel selected, social media advertising can be quite inexpensive to run and achieve similar results to adwords and PPC. Facebook ads have a low barrier to entry in terms of cost and can be an easy way to get your feet wet with social media advertising.
As always, it pays to engage the services of an expert, especially if you don’t want to get burned. As with adwords and PPC, it is possible to spend (and lose) a ton of money on social media advertising, so if you don’t want to fall foul of the law of diminishing returns, I’d always recommend getting a professional involved who can perform A/B testing and assess the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. Throwing up an advert in the hope you’ll get clicks and leads is throwing caution (and money) to the wind.
Summary
Rather like putting a recipe together, you’re going to need ingredients. The most important is your website and you can season to taste by adding social media, email newsletters, email marketing automation, SEO, adwords and PPC, or social media advertising.
Originally published at PENNInk Productions.
