The Real Bruce

Most of us love to talk. We want to be stars or the center of attention. That is why we love Social Media. We love to tell people what we are doing and what is important to us. We also all believe that people actually care.

With that in mind as businesses, it gives us a fantastic opportunity, TO LISTEN. With all of these followers, friends and fans, we have access to a huge database of information, thoughts and ideas. Best of all, these thoughts come from people who are interested enough to have made the initial connection.

We now have, at our fingertips, information that has never been available before. Instant updates as to when someone might be hungry or when someone is out shopping. We can know if someone is looking for a new car, or just ate at the restaurant we own. If we just take the time to listen, we can learn a lot.

After listening, we need to act, of course. Thank the customers for their business, send them a link to a car you sell, or invite them to your next function to get to know them better.

There are many tools out there that make the listening easier and can help you interact better, but the main point is to listen. Social media is a very powerful tool, but sometimes we use it incorrectly. Try changing your approach–Talk less and listen more. It will pay you dividends.

Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Advertising, Blogging, Pay Per Click, Interactive Strategy, Email Marketing, the list can go on and on. These days it seems everyone has a new area of expertise for generating traffic to your site, or your social networks.

While I believe in almost all of these Internet Marketing Strategies, I often wonder when do we talk about your Corporate Internet Marketing, or you Social Media Strategy, why do so many Internet Marketing companies fail to talk about the most important piece to the puzzle, CONVERSION.

Sure I can drive thousands of visitors to your site. I have used Google’s pay per click service with great success. I have seen companies drive a 100,000 visitors a month to their site using this service. I worked with one company in particular who would spend over $40,000 per month, just to generate traffic. Believe me, it does work.

However, when I asked this company the percentage of visitors they converted on their marketing objective they had no idea. After further review, we discovered it was less than 1%. I may not be a rocket scientist, but that seems like a waste of money. What about CONVERSION?

I now see all these companies who claim they are a Social Media Agency. I even saw a proposal that promised to increase the number of fans a company had on Facebook, and to increase their Twitter followers. Again, this is not a bad thing, but what about CONVERSION?

You need to have a Web Business Strategy for how you are going to convert your traffic to be customers or clients. You need to give them multiple opportunities to execute your objective, and you need to make it so straightforward your visitors have no doubt what you want them to do on your site.

As you make your plan, think about the typical grocery store. Where do they put all of everyday items like milk, eggs, meat, etc? Yep, you are correct in the back of the store. Do you think they have a strategy behind that. Absolutely. They are trying to convert their business objective, and to get you to purchase, look at, smell, and sample, other items on your way to the things you really need. They are all about CONVERSION.

As you look at this blog post you may notice small buttons, or self promotional ads all over the page. Do you thing that we just put them there for design purposes? Absolutely not, we have an objective in mind. We blog to get you to our site. We want to get you to our site to tell you more about Internet marketing and what we do as a Internet Marketing Agency in Indianapolis Indiana. We hope you find the information helpful and also candidly we want you to talk to us more and ultimately become your trusted business partner.

So before you spend next years advertising budget with Google, take a few moments to think about what you will do when you drive traffic to your site. Google may be great at driving traffic, but what about CONVERSION?