Caution: Your Customers are Being Detoured
A few weeks ago I experienced my nightmare. I was driving in Atlanta traffic around the I-285 loop, shortly after 5:00 PM, in an absolute downpour. I know some of you reading this are from larger cities and this is a common scenario, but Atlanta is known for their travel difficulties with locals making the joke, “Atlanta is only an hour drive from Atlanta.” Big cities are known for their fun at rush hour.
I, on the other hand, am a small-town country boy and the entire population of some cities I’ve lived in could all hit the road at once and it still not look like this mess, so I was immediately set on edge. But then I saw something that made matters even worse. Up ahead was an orange, flashing sign that said one word: MERGE. All three left-hand lanes were closed ahead, so this entire swerving, horn-honking mob would soon be funneled down into a nice, orderly line, whether we liked it or not.
Trust me, it wasn’t a pleasant experience by any stretch, but it also wasn’t as miserable as I expected it to be. We moved on at a decent pace, merged together in somewhat of an organized fashion and were all on our way before too long. Kudos to you, Atlanta; the coordination of the road crew was impressive to watch. They couldn’t prevent the fender bender that shut down over half of the major roadway, but well-placed barrels, signs and plenty of initial heads-up made the situation only a slight inconvenience, instead of what could have easily been a parking lot backed up to South Carolina.
Since I had some time to think during this, my marketing wheels began turning. According to SEOtribunal.com, Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day worldwide. That’s over TWO TRILLION searches per year. And now to make that statistic more relevant to you: according to Google Trends, as I sit here at 10:30 Central time on a Monday, the words “air conditioner” have been searched 2,731 times within the last hour, nationwide. No, not all of those are potential customers for you. If you’re in Spartanburg, SC, it doesn’t matter to you what people are searching in Oregon, but if you are in Oklahoma City, it may interest you to know that 191 people in the Moore and Goldsby areas have Googled “air conditioner” within the last 60 minutes. No matter where you live, every few seconds someone within your service area is searching “air conditioning repair near me,” “local contractor,” “leaky pipe repair” or any number of other relevant terms saying they need YOU! The internet was at one time referred to as “The Information Super-Highway” because there’s a lot of valuable traffic trying to get somewhere quickly. Following the metaphor of me and several hundred of my friends inching down I-285, if you have the same strategically placed signs and roadblocks, you can detour all that web traffic straight to your doorstep.
Because there are so many doors to come in and the competition is fierce, it’s pretty much impossible to get ALL the traffic steered toward you, but there are ways to increase the odds. Here are a few quick points to make sure you’re getting your fair share.
Check Your Face
First of all, a strong web presence IS important. Don’t let anyone (or that pessimistic voice in the back of your head) tell you differently. Maybe I’m getting the cart before the horse here because my lead-in was about getting traffic to you, now my first point is about being careful what consumers see when they get there. But this must be said. The internet has been around for close to two decades now, and I’m still having to convince contractors daily they’re leaving money on the table with out of date websites, or worse, no website at all.
Contractors are in a service industry where we come to the consumer after they initiate, so your website is the face of your company. A 2015 survey showed that 84% of home consumers believe having a website makes a company appear more credible, and they’re making judgments from there based on how easy it is to use, how up to date it is, etc. 61% of end consumers and a shocking 94% of business to business buyers (your commercial prospects) research online before a purchase decision. And if they’re turned off by what they find, you’ve lost a sale. The way people shop and compare choices between competitors has changed, and if you look out of touch online, you’re driving people away. So, the first step in trying to get more people to come to you is to make sure you aren’t turning them away before they ever get close.
Don’t Forget to Build a Driveway
The next problem I commonly see is not in appearance or lack of effort but solely in execution. Contractors come to us after spending thousands of dollars on monster websites that look beautiful, but they’re frustrated, seeing little return on their investment. Usually one quick metaphor is all it takes for them to realize the problem— “No one could enjoy the beauty of the Taj Mahal if the builder had forgotten to build a driveway.” The driveway and the parking lot are not the flashy parts of a building, but they are no less important in making sure people can find the place and get in.
This point is just as important, if not more so than the tip above, because I’d rather have a slightly out of date website that can be found than 30 beautiful pages full of obscurity. 72% of people never scroll past the first page of search engine results, so if you’re buried on page 7 it’s time to invest in some PPC and SEO work, pronto. “Build it and they will come” might work for corn-field baseball games, but I wouldn’t bet my business on it.
It Takes More Than Just a Website
Hudson,Ink has always preached a holistic approach to marketing. There is no one size fits all, silver bullet that reaches all prospects effectively. Different media types are meant to be used together and to complement each other, and it’s the same way in web marketing. I already shared with you the ridiculous audience available to you through Google, now let this number sink in: 257 million (out of the 327 million total) people in the US are active on some form of social media platform. That’s an average of 5.14 million per state and 85,000 per individual county… Think there’s some potential there? Social media is a fantastic tool to divert some of that traffic your way, but you must build your audience through valuable content, and it needs to end with the user at your website.
What do I mean by “valuable content?” Fill up people’s social feeds with “It’s National Sauerkraut Day” and other posts thrown out there just for the sake of posting, and you’ll get nowhere. Use social media and email to add relevant touches with your prospects, and most importantly, make sure they link back to your website where they have a chance to fill out a form, sign-up for something and improve your SEO. Don’t link them off to a news story, funny article or some other distraction and expect them to remember to come back and thank you later, because that won’t happen.
You provide a service improving their homes and adding value to their lives through convenience and energy efficiency. Stay close to that lane and people will steadily click away from their inboxes and social feeds to your website.
Remember, none of this happens overnight and just as with well-placed barrels and flashing signs on the highway, there’s strategy in every part of directing that traffic where you want it to go. If you need more tips on maximizing your online efforts, we’re here to help. Hudson,Ink offers everything from website performance audits, SEO and PPC work to complete website builds with automated emailing and social posting. Give us a call at (800) 489-9099 or email me at [email protected] to start the conversation.
