M & A Rainmaker

or to put it slightly differently – the number of visitors to your website, the number of those visitors that participate in a call to action ( do something ) and the number of those people that become customers – THAT is the mantra of hubspot.com.

They say that last year they had something like 2 million visitors to thier website of whom 160,000 participated in a call to action and of those about 1,000 became hubspot customers.

It’s a mantra that ALL businesses could do with keeping in mind.

Let’s have a look at this a bit more closely….

Getting Found/Getting Visitors

Hopefully most people now understand that being found by Google when someone types in your company name or a variation of it is a given – if that does not happen then you have not even left first base !! However your objective should be to be found for the products and services that you offer. Ideally you want to be on page 1 when someone searches for your key products and services. How easy or hard this is to do depends entirely on the competitiveness of the keywords and phrases that relate to your products and services.

 Getting found for what you have to offer is absolutely key.

Recently I have been having two in depth discussions with people that I am helping:

1.  Tell me the most important products and services that you want to sell ( List them all and then put them in order of priority ).

2. Tell me what keywords and phrases you think people will type in ( to Google ) to find your main products and services.

I don’t expect them to know every variation of keyword or phrase nor do I expect them to know how competitive ( how hard to rank high for ) those keywords and phrases are. I can find that out myself or with the assistance of my team.

The next thing that I tell them to do is to

3. Get Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools installed on thier website and to get access to it ( for which they will need a Googlemail email address ).

The reason for this is that we need a baseline ( a starting point ) to see the effect that we have on things like visitors, keywords, referrals, links etc etc

Understanding  what you want to promote and the keywords and phrases that relate to it  is the foundation of everything that you will do on the Internet to promote yourself and get more visitors to your website.

The basic key to a high ranking website is on page SEO ( keywords, titles,metatags – related to your keywords and phrases ) , frequently changing and updated, relevant content and lots of ( good ) inbound links.

In thier ” Getting Found ” section Hubspot highlight SEO, Blogs and Social Media. These are the basic areas to address to improve the visibility and ranking of your website:

– SEO your website ( titles,tags,content etc ) in accordance with your keywords and phrases.

– Establish ( seperate ) blogs

– Establish pages in social media ( Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg etc etc etc )

In doing so you will establish an ” ecosystem ” of related online media. You will establish a network of friends/followers/etc for your blog(s) and for each of your social networks and you will also connect them to your website and to you ( they may come to you about business direct from your blog or social media page or they may come to you via your website ).

It is difficult to describe just how powerful this set of interconnected networks is. Facilities like ” share ” and ” join ” enable you to share information posted in one place to all the other places and to invite your friends from one place to another place.

Anyway, by now it will be time to look at your analytics to see where the traffic and links are coming from and how many visitors you are getting now.

Once you have got visitor to your website you have got to get them to do something.

Convert

On the hubspot home page ( thier main landing page ) you will see a number of ” calls to action ” e.g. ” Try Hubspot free for 7 days ” or ” Download a free Inbound Marketing Kit “. To do this you will need to provide them with information about yourself . This might range from a name and email address to a more comprehensive list of details about you and your requirements.

Each one of these is a ” lead “. You have converted a visit to a lead. ( Well done ).

As Hubspot mention – you need to track and manage these leads – then you need to analyse them –  so many referrals to the website came from ?? and they eg downloaded a white paper and then they did ??

Analyse

Analysis would include online and offline analysis. You want to analyse how well your marketing is doing; look at your competitive analysis ( how well are you doing relative to your competitors ) and also look at the quality of the leads. You should ensure that everyone in the company asks where leads came from – and not just ” from the Internet ” – you want to know whereabouts on the Internet !