What are they looking for? We talk about “the customers expectations” a lot throughout our site. We feel this is one of many areas that should not be overlooked during a campaign, especially an online search oriented campaign. It’s a big factor in all media efforts (print, radio, TV, etc) but in those mediums you have only polling numbers and market share estimates to go by. A lot of complex data, and data a small to mid sized business does not have access too, or time to go through. Instead the magazine gives you it’s demographic numbers and you decide if your budget can take the hit for a while to find out if it’s true.
Why is it different in a search campaign? Well, because we know what they searched for. Ah-ha, yeah I know it’s not a huge epiphany or bright light bulb. It’s simple, and simple is so overlooked in today’s huge markets. The beauty is in it’s simplicity, since you know what they searched for, you know what to show them. Example: Some just visited your web site after searching for “Arizona injury lawyer”, yet another searched for “Peoria Medical malpractice lawyer”.
When the technical portion of the marketing campaign is done properly, and if it’s in line with the overall strategy of the campaign, you can display a different page for each of those visitors. Each page speaks more to their specific needs based on what they searched. So the one that needs an injury lawyer instantly views a page related to your experiences with injury law and what forms they can fill-out on your site (right now) to get started with the case, the one who needs to take his doctor to court can see all of the cases where you succeeded in taking care of your clients legal needs related to malpractice. If the visitor searched “help in my practices malpractice suite”, you can show where you have helped the doctor win cases.
It’s interesting (to us anyway) how different a specifically placed word can explain what that visitors intentions are, what condition they are in, what side of the story they are coming from. For example, if you sold legal text books you would know that someone searching for “important legal text for my customers” is probably not a lawyer. Because lawyers use the word ‘client’ not ‘customer’. Plumbers, Electricians, construction workers, doctors, teachers, all use a different word for the same thing in many cases.
Do you know your audience?
Being more specific about the whole concept here, I want to discuss how you get a sale based on all this. Think of your website as your outsourced sales force. You have to teach your sales force, you have to give them the tools, you have to research your customer (surveys: “how are we doing, where can we improve, what did you like about” etc). All those things would be considered if you either hired a sales force or if you set out to build a sales force. Do you know your client, do you know your customer, do you know their fears, their concerns, their state of mind (perspective on this ‘issue’ –the issue of this particular sale –whether that be you selling them a radio/car or tax returns). I would bet that you do. So what does it mean…
It means you have powerful information and you can sell to more of the people that come to your site than you ever thought possible. Hopefully this is a good example.
When searching for technical services the CEO does not know what good technical support is. When selling services you must sell something that does not exist, to someone who does not know what a good one is. How do you possibly do this? Well it’s not done well and it’s not done often. Knowing what the customers perspective is on this ‘issue’ and what their ‘pain/concerns’ are helps tremendously. Typically what happens here is the person looking finds what he/she believes are the top 3 and divides their gut feeling into the overall price. Then they stick with that decision for far too long (as is the case most of the time, until they are hurt badly enough to start the process again). What if your technical support company was the one that spoke to them directly. What if you were the only one that had a third variable in this equation. You know how they feel, you speak clearly to them about a subject they know nothing about, you show them instantly that they are important to you (which is their pain).
They searched for “understandable technical support for mid size business in phoenix”.
How were you able to speak to them, know their perspective, and know their pain? I can put it into one word “search”.
Is your website really selling for you?
Adam Yax is CTO of http://www.phoenixsynergy.com; which provides internet marketing in Phoenix, AZ.
