Let me ask you a question?

How many new clients did you get from your website this year? This week?

If your answer is none, then there is a problem with your website that is costing you business.

Today, 98% of purchases begin with online research. Your website is often the first impression a new customer will have with your company.

How do you know if your website is defective? Easy, how many inquiries are you getting from your website in the last week, month – year?

Today, your prospective new clients are the most educated and well-informed group of consumers in history. They “Google” it when they are shopping.

The bigger the ticket item you are selling or if you are in a heavily competitive business the more vital it is to have a professionally designed website.

Five or ten years ago you could get away with an “electronic brochure “ website design but today you will lose business because of it. The days of being able to have an “electronic brochure” of a website are long gone.

Something is wrong with your website: does it seem more difficult to get a new client today than ever before?

The reason it seems harder to get in front of prospective new customers today is that you don’t have your business set up as a lead-generating machine.

Step 1 and the 880 HP Hellcat engine of your “lead machine” today is your website. If you do nothing else but have a good website you will be way ahead of the majority of competitors in your area.

10 Ways to Turn Your Website into a Lead-Generating Machine

1. The number one reason is your website doesn’t generate business is that it is outdated. The site looks old, the content is confusing and difficult to read and navigate. There is no flow or logical next step for the visitor to take on the site. The site is a smattering of random information.

2. The content is difficult to understand. If a visitor to your website is greeted by strange words, industry terminology, and terms, visitors will get confused and quickly leave your website.

Don’t assume consumers will understand your industry lingo. They generally don’t and won’t take the time to look up they will just leave your site and go to a competitor’s website.

3. Your website is difficult to navigate. When a prospect goes to your website they are usually looking for an answer to a question. People are not going to hunt and peck around to find what they are looking for on your website. If they don’t see it – they will leave, quickly.

When people go to your website they should be able to easily see where to go to get information or at least a promising direction for the answer.

Unclear navigation is the number one reason why visitors will leave a site.

4. Generic content. This is a real killer. All the search engines are built around helping people find useful content and answers to their questions.

Making your website a resource by providing useful information will help you rank higher in searches.

5. Make sure your site is registered with Google business as well as the other search engines as well. This is the basis of getting more traffic to your website.

6. Make getting reviews from customers a priority. Reviews do two things: 1. They provide validation for buying decisions. And 2 they help you to rank higher on searches the more reviews the better.

7. Hire a professional to design your website.  Look, I know it may seem easy to DIY with one of those website template sites. Unless you are a designer and understand the importance of things like eye trail, site navigation, and programming you are wasting your time. There is a lot more to designing an effective website than putting a pretty picture and logo on a page.

The cost for a custom website averages between $1800 to $3500 depending on what you need and want. We also offer a monthly lease option for a new website that ranges in cost from $129 to $169 per month and includes hosting on a high-speed server.

8. Branding is neglected. Your prospective new customers have hundreds of options for similar products and services at their fingertips.  Your new customers buy you first. The more personal and helpful you make your website the better.

At the end of the day, what are you selling? It is not your product or service. You are selling help. Solutions to a problem. If you think about it – that is your brand, the place that provides help and solutions to problems your customers have.

9. No call to action or a hard-to-find call to action on the website. What do you want your website visitor to do on this page?

• Do you want them to download a report?
• Schedule an appointment?
• Go to the next logical page on your site?
• Call you for a consultation?

What?

The call to action needs to be clear. Every page should take the person to the next logical step. The next step for the visitor should always be obvious and easy to see. This is the foundation of an effective website.

10. Your phone number is hard to find. Look, at the end of the day, most businesses don’t make a sale unless you get in front of a client. The first step is usually a phone conversation.

Your phone number should be all over your website and should not be in small print in an obscure place on your site. You need prospects to call you, every fiber of your website should be your be geared toward inviting a person to call or take the next step.

The formula for an effective website is:

1. Get and hold attention.
2. To provide help and answers.
3. Add value by educating and enlightening.
4. Invite action regularly, often on every page.
5. Get visitors to want to have a live conversation with you.

TRAFFIC: the most overlooked thing about websites today is you have to drive traffic to your site. You can have a beautiful website and still get no leads from it. You have to have traffic in your store.

There are two basic ways to drive traffic to your website:

One: buy ads on Google & Facebook. When you buy ads on Google & Facebook you will often be going up against competitors with more money and expertise than you have. You start at a disadvantage before you even get started.

Two: a more direct and effective is Direct Mail. What makes direct mail so effective is you can buy a mailing list of exactly who you want to reach and put a message they can hold in their hands. We also have a program that combines Direct Mail with Google and Social Media that is effective and affordable.

The distressed property industry is very competitive and getting more so every day. Check mailers are a great way to produce distressed property leads. This type of mailer generates more calls than any other type of direct mailer.

What Exactly is a Check Mailer?

A check mailer is simply a sales letter that appears to be a check in an envelope.

For real estate buyers, if you are looking for a way to get through to owners of a distressed property then a check mailer is efficient for three reasons:

1. It gets noticed. Especially for people who have hit on hard times and are looking for a way out.
2. Combine the check with a sales letter and you can explain how you can help the homeowner from being foreclosed on.
3. Direct mail allows you to put your message directly in the hands of your best prospects.

A check mailer generates a response far and beyond any other type of marketing you can do.

There are only 3 things that can go wrong with a promotional check mailer– only three:

One. You are using an old, stale, or incorrectly targeted mailing list. The source of your data is important, especially for distressed property.

Two. Your message fails to communicate.

Three. You do not have a built-in follow-up method with your mailer program.

If you are looking to generate distressed property leads, check mailers can provide the best response.

 

There is no doubt that it takes more effort to generate a new lead today than it did a few years ago.

Research has shown that the average prospect will respond to advertising and marketing after 8 to 12 contacts (or touches).  My feeling is that it takes even more touches than that to get a response today. People are over-advertised nowadays and ads are everywhere. The average person is exposed to over 1800+ advertising messages in a single day.

To further complicate the process of getting a new customer, the Internet puts you right smack in the middle of a pot of competitive stew.  There are so many choices for your prospects. Who do they choose? The sheer volume of choices a person who is interested in your services has created a sort of bottleneck in your prospective new customer’s mind and complicates their decision-making process.

It use to be that you ran an ad in the local paper or sent out a mailer and you were able to tell exactly what you got for the expense. Not any more.

So what do you do? You need new customers, in fact, if you are not seeking new potential new customers for your business, more aggressive competitors will soon leave you in the dust.

So what is the best way to generate a new lead today?

The answer to that question is in three parts:

1. You have to get noticed.
2. You have to create interest.
3. You have to follow-up, and follow-up, and follow-up… and follow-up some more.

When it comes to the “sales funnel” there are four types of potential new customers for your business:

1) A SUSPECT:  This is a group of people you think would be good prospective new customers for your business.

• This is based on a profile you put together for who is the best buyer of your product or service.
• It is from this “profile” that you get the mailing list or select the media that best reaches these people.
• Suspects are at the top and wide end of your sales funnel. You want lots of them to load at the top of your company’s sales funnel.

2) A LEAD: A lead is someone who has responded to your advertising. You usually do not know much about them other than they filled out a form on your website or called in for an estimate.  They may or may not be a qualified buyer for you. You will not know until you have a conversation with them and qualify them.

• Just because you talked to them once does not mean they will automatically open their wallets and buy. This is especially true the larger the ticket of the item you are selling. So, you follow-up & follow-up.
• A lot of work goes into the “lead” section of your sales funnel because your company is most likely not the only one this person has reached out to. They are in the researching phase of the buying cycle.
• The rule of thumb is the squeaky wheel when gets the grease. The grease is in this situation is your following-up with them.

3) A PROSPECT: This is a lead that you have spoken to and qualified to be a good potential new customer for your business.

A prospect is someone who has reached out to you and you have had a conversation with. You know a little about them and what they want. Maybe you sent them a proposal.

• You have decided that this person is a good potential new customer for your business.
• You present them and if you don’t close them, you follow up with them.
• It may require you to send them a brochure that explains the benefits and answer typical questions.

4) A CUSTOMER: This one is obvious. The person bought something from you. This is the bottom of the funnel. The majority of the work is done to create a new customer.

• You still want to have a marketing program the goes to your customers on a regular or semi-regular basis.

The majority of businesses today are losing hundreds of prospects because they do not know who is on their website and do not have a tool to follow up with any anonymous visitors to their website. Our Direct Mail Scout program gives small businesses the tools to identify and follow up with website traffic.

The best way to generate a new customer is by hitting your “suspects” from a variety of channels.  A channel is simply the medium you are using to advertise, i.e. direct mail, email marketing,  Facebook, Google advertising, TV, etc.

You are trying to do two things when you advertise…get ATTENTION and generate INTEREST.

For our clients, we offer a program called Direct Mail Scout where we hit the prospect in the following ways for our clients in a single program.

• Direct mail is still the best way to get in front of the majority of people. Mailing lists have come a long way and you can precisely target who you want to reach.
• Google ads, both geo-targeting and remarketing.
• Facebook, both geo-targeting and remarketing.
• Gmail ads, 65% of the population has a Gmail account and Gmail runs ads at the top of the email inbox.
• Email sent by USPS as part of their Informed Delivery program. This program announces that your mailpiece is being delivered.
• Youtube video The 2^nd largest volume of searches on the Internet is Youtube.
• LeadMatch. We identify prospects who went to your website and left. It is like a caller-ID for your website. With LeadMatch you can build a list of hot prospects to market to.

The biggest error most business owners and marketing people make is that they do not understand what it takes to generate a lead today. There is no shortcut way to do it and no one medium can do the job by itself. That is where we come in to coordinate and execute for you. For more information, click here.

Often a business brochure is thrown together. You grab a product photo or two, slap some verbiage together, and BAM you have a brochure. Unfortunately, you also probably have wasted your time and effort because your brochure will fail to communicate and invoke action.

Why? Because there are at least 11 points that most brochures for small businesses leave out that will affect the overall performance of the brochure itself.

By performance I mean results. The purpose of that beautiful full-color brochure is to move a customer to a decision to buy or at least closer to buying and to separate you from your competition.

How can you make your business brochures more effective?

The following are 11 powerful techniques that will improve the look and effectiveness of your business’s sales brochures.

Your businesses marketing brochures will create an impression of professionalism and competence or it will leave the impression of a small-time shady operation.

The bigger the ticket item the more important it is to have professionally designed and printed brochures and sales literature.

So, what can you do to make your business brochures stand out and, more importantly, be effective? By effective, we’re talking about the result of getting people to buy your products and services.

The following are 11 tips to help you create powerful sales brochures and literature:

1. Start your planning with the reader’s point-of-view in mind. Before you sit down and slap together a brochure, spend some time looking at the end-user.

• Who is your end-user?
• What questions do they usually have?
• What benefits of your product or service do they want?
• How does your product or service solve a problem for them?

2. What is the purpose of your brochure?

• Is it to help over-come buying objections for a specific product or service?
• Is it to educate the buyer about the benefits of a product or service?
• Is it an overall company introduction piece?

3. Promote only one product per brochure. Resist the urge to put every product or service you offer. The reason for this is your brochure will become too cluttered and will be hard to read and follow. The result is that no one will buy what you are trying to sell.

I understand you want to showcase and highlight everything your business offers, but you should do a separate brochure for each product you offer.

An example of this is your local bank; they have a separate brochure for checking accounts, credit cards, and mortgage loans. The reason is if you are interested in a checking account you want information about just checking accounts. Anything else in that brochure would distract you from what your main purpose is.

4. The headline. Your headline is your main attention-getter.

Your Headline has to convey the main benefit of the product or service expressed in easy to understand language.

The purpose of a headline is to get the attention of the end-user and create an interest in reading your brochure. (There are some tricks to creating good headlines that Wilson Print Marketing can help you with.)

5. Use of graphics. Choose graphic elements that help to communicate the message you want to convey. Graphic elements should support the message not distract from it.
6. Avoid using industry terminology. If you have to use industry terms always define them and do not assume your reader will know what they mean. This is also true about specific designations and titles. The quickest way to lose your reader is to use terminology they do not understand.

I have seen brochures that are so packed with big terms that it makes you wonder if they are trying to sell a product or impress you with how smart they are. What these brochures accomplish is in making the reader feel stupid.

Every industry has terminology that everyone in the industry knows. The error is in assuming your reader/end-user will know and understand your terminology.

When people come across terminology they don’t understand your intended communication is broken as a result. The reader’s eyes glass over and they throw the brochure away.

7. Avoid being boring. The quickest way to be boring is to use tired worn-out cliché’s in your brochure.

Avoid saying things like “conveniently located”, “in business for 50 years” and for god’s sake, do not put a photo of your building on the cover of the brochure, unless somehow your building is of some benefit to the reader.

8. White space is your friend. Avoid packing brochures with too much copy. We are in a sound bite, small clip era – keep it short and simple.

When your reader opens a brochure packed with information the instinct is to close it and put it down. This is called information overload.

Use white space to calm the piece down, highlight main points and help sell your message. When the reader opens the brochure you want them to instantly be interested. Your brochure must appear easy read.

9. Call-to-action is important. How do you want them to respond? Why should they respond now? Your call to action should be easy to see. Do not make the reader search around on how to respond.
10. The Buy Now Offer. What is your ultimate goal? You want to sell something, right? Give the reader a reason/benefit of calling you now as opposed to six months from now. The buy-now is a marketing basic yet I am surprised how often this point is neglected.

Without a buy-now offer, your piece is an image-branding piece. Branding and image are ok if you are a big company with a board of directors and investors you want to make feel good. Unfortunately, a small business needs and wants to sell something today and a sole branding piece does not sell.

11. Resist the DIY impulse. I know it seems easy but there is more to designing a brochure than arranging photos and copy. Mistakes commonly made by DIY graphic designers are:

• New Times Roman is not the best font to use.
• Using several different fonts that are not in the same font family.
• Boxy sterile-looking design.
• No eye trail. You want to guide the reader’s eye. There are several tricks a professional designer uses to do this.
• There is no color balance making your brochure look busy and difficult to read.
• Folds and margins are off and can make your brochure look unprofessional.
• NO, Vista Print template designers or any other online design templates are not good to use.

Online graphic design templates are there to help the printer sell printing not to help you sell your product.

You may feel like you are saving money on design but when your brochure does not work you end up wasting money on printing.

Hire a professional to help you design your brochure for your small business and other sales literature. Wilson Print Marketing has several designers on staff to help you create the perfect brochure for your small business.

Today more than ever, you need printed materials to market and sell your product or service. The problem with using only digital media and online literature is in 2 seconds your digital brochure is gone, a printed brochure is held, is real, and creates a lasting impression.

Your business website design can be one of the single most important things to have for your business today. Many business owners and managers do not understand how vital a functional website is to the success of their business.

Everything changed in the world of marketing back in 2007 when Apple released the first iPhone. Over the next few years Androids, iPads, and Notebooks flooded the market almost overnight. Now it is easier and more convenient than ever for people to access the Internet.

If you were not paying attention, you might have missed this important trend which makes it vital for you to have a good website and not just an electronic billboard.

Internet and Website Trends Today

72% of people who have smartphones use it to access the internet. 51% of all internet traffic as of the writing of this article, is via a smartphone.

What happens when someone sees an advertisement for your business today? 94% of people will go online and research your business. They will look at your website, services offered, and read your online reviews.

According to Google Analytics, 96% of people who go to your website will leave without taking any further action. These people will not sign up for your electronic newsletter; they will not download a free report; they just leave and go to one of your competitors who came up when they Googled your company name.

There is a term used in online marketing – conversions. This simply means the people from your website that converted to a lead by filling out a form or called you directly, or if you have a shopping cart they bought something.

How your website is designed either help your conversions or hurts them. This means your website design will either generate leads and new customers or it won’t.

As a business owner, website design may sound like a foreign world and very complicated. People who design websites tend to make it seem that way, often it just hides the fact that they don’t know what they are doing.

10 Things To Consider When Creating a Business Website Design

#1: It is very simple really. What do you want when you go to a website? You want answers to questions, product information, prices, and solutions to problems. You do not what to have to look around. The flow should be obvious. Elements should be clear.

What things do your customers want to find when they are looking for your product or service?

#2 What is your goal with your business website design? In other words, what is the purpose of your website?

If you have a clear purpose of what you want to accomplish with your website it will be easier for you to communicate what is wanted to your web designer.

#3 Pages with clear headlines that answer the question of “what is in it for me?”

#4 Don’t use industry nomenclature and terminology. You will just confuse and cause your visitors’ eyes to glaze over and hasten a click out of your website. Explain in common language and present your services as benefits to the reader.

#5 Basic elements are: what, why, and how will it help me and how much is it. These are the most common things people are looking for. The “how much?” should be limited because for most businesses when you put a price on the website it stops the reach to call you and you want them to contact you.

Make it easy to contact you. The phone number should be prominently displayed everywhere possible.

#6 Call to action buttons or “doorknobs” as they are called are obvious. A doorknob opens a door to another section on your website. Doorknobs should be related to the subject being addressed or direct the person to the next logical step on their quest for more information.

#7 Don’t be obnoxious with pop-ups. Pop-ups are necessary to get conversions/leads but if used too much will drive people off your website.

#8 If possible, make your website a resource. People are on the internet looking for help and solutions to a problem. Go out of your way to provide service and to provide useful information.

The trick is to only provide enough information to “wet their whistle”, not to quench their thirst. You want to increase the reach of the person for more information to the point that they call or email you.

#9 Note on domains: Everyone’s first instinct is to select a domain for their website that is their company name. Which in some circumstances is okay, but it is better to have a domain that has keywords that people would search for. For example, a financial advisor could have retirementplanning.com or taxplanning.com or retiremeright.com

#10 hire a professional web designer. Just because WordPress and other services make it easy to design a website it does not mean you should have your brother-in-law or friend design it. There is a technology to designing and programming a website that you need to have in order to have a successful website.

We have a business web design division with the best designers and programmers to help your business have the best possible website.

 Have a question? Fill out the form below and one of our Marketing Consultants will contact you shortly.

Postcard marketing is easy and effective for most small businesses. How do you design an effective postcard? Should you use one of those postcard templates you found online?

You want to design an effective postcard that is aesthetic and looks good. The problem is that “aesthetic” and “looking good” may not create a response and drive the traffic you want from your postcard mailer.

You are not designing a home decorating project that Joanna Gaines would be proud of. YOU ARE TRYING TO GET THE ATTENTION OF AND DEVELOP INTEREST IN an offer you hope a prospect will respond to.

First Things First, Things To Consider Before You Get Started

Before you begin designing an effective postcard consider the end-user, AKA the recipient of the postcard. What is happening with your average prospect today?

• They are very busy.
• They are very rushed.
• They consume media and advertising very lazily with their attention being sporadic and bouncing from one thing to another.
• Consumers are bombarded with over 1800 advertising messages a day. Some ignore most of what they see and hear.

The Following Are 10 Design Tips That Get Your Postcard Design Noticed:

1. Clear and bold headline. The headline should contain the main benefit of the product or offer.
2. Relevant photos and graphics.
3. Use bright colors in the design. Remember the first step to any successful ad campaign is getting noticed. Pastel colors do not get noticed unless they are used to contrast brighter colors.
4. You must include a special offer on your postcard. Give the prospect a reason to respond. The offer has to be of real value to the prospect.
5. Reinforce the main headline on the front of the postcard with subheadline on the back that ties in and is relevant.
6. Always include benefits to every feature mentioned. People buy benefits.
7. Do not forget your company name, logo, website and most importantly your phone number. The phone number should be in at least two places on the postcard.
8. Design-wise, your call-to-action has to almost clash with the rest of the card. It needs to be loud, bright and very noticeable. Make sure your call-to-action contains a benefit for responding now. By definition, a call-to-action is an action phrase, for example, “Call now and receive (blank) for $$$!
9. Always have an expiration date on your offer. If it looks like they can buy your product or service anytime, why buy now?
10. If you have reviews and testimonials include them. Third-party validation goes a long way today.

Click Here To See More Postcard Samples

Your Website – Is It Ready To Handle Leads?

Today 90% of people who have an interest in your postcard offer will go online and check out your website and reviews. Make sure your website looks good and is designed to convert people from shoppers to buyers. I have seen many marketers lose 80% of their potential results with an outdated, poorly designed website.

Watched the Video? Interested? Click Here For More Info

Do not get cheap and hire your brother-in-law to design your website. Invest a little money and do it right. Your returns and leads from your website will pay off with a good design

Getting noticed is the first step in any ad campaign. Postcard marketing puts a message directly in your best prospects hands. Do not waste this opportunity to get noticed. If your design is poor with too much information on the card and does not grab attention your mailer goes in the trash without even so much as a yawn.

Need help designing an effective postcard mailer and campaign for your small business? Fill out the form below and one of our Marketing Consultants will contact you shortly.

Sales letters are, by definition, a means to market your business and drive sales in your door.

Writing effective sales letters means following a simple format and writing in a conversational style that engages the prospect.

1. Get attention. You have to get the attention of your prospects. The style and format of the sales letter and envelope is the first step to getting noticed.
2. What problem are you solving for the prospect? The first line of an effective sales letter should state the problem you are going to solve for the prospect.
3. Build the ruin. What happens if their problem is not handled or otherwise solved? It is the old pain versus pleasure story. People will do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. What is the pain they could experience if they do not solve their problem?
4. Provide a solution. Demonstrate how you will solve the problem. How are you going to help them?
5. Credibility. Tell them why you are the best to help them with their problem. By presenting your credentials, experiences, and successes you are increasing your creditability to your prospect.
6. The benefits. Explain the benefits of what you are offering and what is in it for them to do business with you.
7. Provide proof of your claims. Anyone can make a claim, but few go the extra step of validating their claims. People see through BS. So do not BS and always back up your claims with proof.
8. Give them a reason to act now. Otherwise known as, make them an offer they can’t refuse.
9. Limited Time. Imply there is a scarcity or limited time to act.
10. Back it up. Always include a guarantee if they are not happy. It is in your best interest to do so. You do not want to muddy up your market with dissatisfied customers.
11. Call to action. Ask for the order.
12. Remind the prospect. Close your sales letter with a reminder that the offer is for a limited time and that they need to act now.

Click Here For More Information About Sales Letters

Understanding The Reader (Your Prospect) And Handling Objections

After writing your sales letter, step back and read it from the perspective of your reader. What objections, concerns or questions would you have about the communication?

First of all, please understand that you are never going to overcome or handle an objection, question or concern fully in a sales letter.

Your goal is to get attention, build interest, create desire and create questions that need to be answered by the prospect. You have to invoke the urge to CALL or GO SEE to get more information. As a business owner, you will want to have live communication with the prospect! This is the part of the sales equation where objections are handled and questions are answered.

Having said that, there are objections your readers will have. For example, when you read your sales letter back to yourself, from the perspective of your potential customer, ask yourself the following:

1. Does this company understand the problem I am facing?
2. How do I know you’re reputable or otherwise qualified to handle the problem?
3. I don’t believe you.
4. I really don’t need this right now.
5. How do I know it will work for me?
6. What happens if I don’t like it?
7. Sounds expensive, I can’t afford it.

Writing effective sales letters is not as difficult at you might think it is. Just keep within the above points.

If you have any questions, or would like a quote for printing and mailing a sales letter campaign for your business, fill out the form below and one of our marketing consultants will contact you: