In our previous post, we discussed the concept of the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) two-step, and ended by introducing the concept of the “easy sale”.
What’s the easy sale? That’s the offer on your Website that allows your prospect to sign up for an e-newsletter / request a whitepaper / complete a scorecard – anything that allows them to learn more about your company without the risk of having to speak to a live human being – or worse – the dreaded “Sales Representative”. In return, you capture their contact info (email address minimum) which now allows you to continue marketing to this prospect on an ongoing basis and puts you in control of the sales cycle.
For products or services that are fairly complex or sophisticated (quite common in B2B), the easy sale is key. People don’t buy what you sell on first contact. Rather, it’s the beginning of a communications and sales cycle that could last weeks or months. But if you don’t get their contact info when they visit your site, the conversation is usually over forever the moment they click away from your site.
For simpler products and services (think B2C), the concept of the easy sales still applies. It just happens to be the same as the REAL sale. But your Website still needs to make the visitor’s purchase of your product or service, easy, intuitive, low risk and pain free.
At this time, SEM is probably the single best marketing investment most SMBs can make. It’s relatively low cost, delivers a high ROI, and is easy to measure.
So to summarize:
Step #1: Use SEM to get found by those looking for what you sell.
Step #2: Use the easy sale to convert visitors into identified prospects.
In future posts we’ll look at the components of SEM in more detail, and discuss the Do’s and Don’ts of effective SEM for SMBs.
Search Engine Marketing - The Importance Of The "Easy Sale" - To learn more about this author, visit Rich Gaasenbeek's Website.
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Rich Gaasenbeek
(Visit Rich's Website)
Rich Gaasenbeek's passion is helping
small and medium sized businesses grow
faster and make more money through better
marketing. Marketing that is integrated,
cost-effective and most importantly, lead
generation driven. Through his company
Marketing Leads Inc. www.
marketingleads.ca, Rich helps clients
to increase sales to existing customers,
generate new leads, enter new markets, and
introduce new products and services. Rich
is known by some as “the sales reps’
marketer” because of his deep empathy with
sales reps and his understanding that any
marketing that doesn’t produce a lead
doesn’t mean a thing to the average sales
rep trying to make his or her quota.
Rich's clients appreciate the time he
takes to get to know their business, the
creativity and commitment he brings to the
table, and his overall business savvy.
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