Direct Mail Marketing News

What’s in a handshake, anyways?

Your door hanger should be like a handshake: gripping, timely, and to the point. They should leave people like, well, you’ve just shaken their hand. It’s a gesture of goodwill.  I mean, isn’t that essentially what you’re doing when you’re canvassing an area with leave-behinds and flyers? And because no business owner has the time to drop by each residence and deliver their message personally, marketing experts can help you achieve the same effect from the comfort of your office!

So let’s jump ahead into designing that perfect door hanger. After all, how useful is a poorly designed door hanger to your business? About as useful as a hole in the head! So let’s help you design the very best ones, the ones that drive people straight to the phone to call and book an appointment.

Designing the perfect door hanger is much easier than you think. Here are the 5 things to remember:

1. Be eye catching. That is, have a firm handshake. Be noticeable. Selecting an image for your door hanger isn’t strikingly different from selecting an image for your postcard, except that it’s vertical. The same core rule applies: choose an image that can be seen and understood from afar. A good test, if you’re not sure, is to bring it up on your computer. Walk ten feet away, turn around three times and then look at the screen. Is it immediately clear? If not, keep searching!

2. Be relevant. Handshakes are the start to an introduction, and your image needs to convey a thousand words about your business at a glance. Be as straightforward as possible. If you’re a realtor, it very well might be your pretty mug. But if you’re a dentist, it’s someone else’s brilliant white smile. If you’re a landscaper, it’s perfect box hedges. If you’re a plumber, more than likely, it’s a wrench. Have something that tells people what your business is even before they get close enough to read the text.

3. Be personalized. Personalization is about shaking the right person’s hand. You want to get the correct message to the correct person and while you won’t always be able to address them by first name with a door-hanger, you can make sure that your ad is at least relevant. Don’t, for example, go putting ads for pool cleaning on people’s doors if they live in an apartment complex. Make sure you match up the message, the season, and the pictures to the type of home or office you’re flyering.

4. Have a clear call to action. In other words, let them know why you’re shaking their hand. What exactly do you want people to do with your door hanger? If there isn’t a clear phone number, website link, or call-to-action, then all you’ve done is send them a free picture. This is the #1 area where small business owners falls short in their marketing, so don’t be one of them by making your CTA bold and obvious!

5. Quality matters. When you’ve only got one fleeing shot at impacting the customer with a positive impression, nothing undercuts your efforts more than bad, poor quality printing. If it’s not glossy, the picture looks grainy, or there are ink smudges, they’ll assume that your business is equally careless. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by cutting corners! Choose a printer or partner that can deliver the same high quality that your business does.

And with that, you’re there! The next step is to decide what neighborhoods you want to canvass and you’ve got what you need to order the first batch today! If you want some help getting things moving, give us a call at 877-222-6010!

How’s your overall marketing strategy? 

Any keen marketer who follows our blog knows what question coming next: how does this fit into your broader marketing strategy? Door hangers are most effective when supported by direct mail postcard campaigns, so contact Opportunity Knocks Marketing for help with both today!

What’s the deal with social media anyhow?

Social media: just a passing fad? Hardly! While that question is still around, many businesses who have ignored social media are not. It’s high time that you create a strong presence and leverage it elsewhere in your marketing!

Any good marketing strategy of course should look something like trident: one central message, but several different approaches or “channels.” This might be direct mail, blog, email, and social media.

How does the trident approach change everything? 

Its because you probably think social media means more work for you. But the same messages that you already use elsewhere are perfectly valid on social media! You don’t have to reinvent the wheel or enlist the help of a millennial (although it never hurts!). Savvy marketers on a shoestring budget make it simple by chopping up existing ads into bite-sized morsels for social media consumption. Here’s a quick example:

For example, here’s a full advertisement for Chip’s Landscaping Service:

Are you settling for brown patches in your lawn? You don’t have to live this way! Turn your yard from an embarrassment into the lush and thriving envy of the neighborhood! Chip’s landscaping has been in the business for more than 20 years and has expertise in residential, commercial, and is ready for all seasons! 

His Facebook post:

His Twitter message:

His Instagram post:

Congratulations, you’re already a social media whiz and you didn’t even know it!

The next step, and this is where you’ll really start seeing an ROI, is to use social media to enhance the postcard marketing campaigns you’re already running.

One message, many outlets: Here are the top 3 use-cases to get started: 

1. Use your Social Media profile as a landing page for postcard campaigns: You can support the postcard campaigns you’re already running by hiding additional information on the social media site, like the discount offer code. It forces them to interact, visit, and get addicted to your brand! Just place the social media logos and your URL (or handle, for Instagram and Twitter) and direct them from the offline world to the online one.

From here, another hidden benefit emerges. While you can track when your postcards are delivered, you can now also track when those people visit your digital profile or website. It gives you another layer of verification to measure campaign success so you can make better decisions with each campaign.

2. Use postcards to drive social followers: once you have people on your social media site, you need to hook them for the long term. Encourage them to like, share, follow, or interact with your content to develop the relationship further. It solidifies their impression of you, and every minute they spend on there is a minute of free advertising.

As you collect a sizable number of followers you can reach out to them with more offers! A few of our customers have gotten really creative and doubled the effectiveness of their postcard campaigns by warning people that they’re coming with a social media blast!

3. Use Social Media to collect marketing information. In today’s digital-first world consumers are far more comfortable than you might think about sharing their information online. By “gating” content on your website or social profile and using a form to ask for their contact information, you can gather valuable marketing data.

Gathering email addresses this way is a great start but if you go a step further and ask for their physical address, you can start spotting trends in where your customers are concentrated and target them with personalized postcard campaigns!

Not too difficult, right? We sure don’t think so, and we’ll worth the commitment of building the profiles. By chopping up ads that you already run and employing the trident strategy you can enhance your postcard campaigns with social media.

Don’t waste any time: you now have the tools, try it out and start your next postcard campaign powered by social media! Call 877-222-6010 today to get it going!

Imagine you’re a fisherman on a dock. You’ve got a single hook and sinker and you’re waiting for a bite. Along comes another fisherman who walks up to a rope tied to the dock. He hauls up massive net with a boatload of fish, and then packs up and leaves. You look down at your rod and wonder what you’ve been doing wrong. This is the advantage of content marketing.

Let’s begin with a definition from the Content Marketing Institute:

Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

This is more than advertisements, its helpful advice. Content marketing is about being an expert that people want to listen to and in turn, trust to handle their landscaping, food choice, home repair, and decorating. Now, if it’s so powerful, why do most businesses neglect to do it? Because it requires that you give away your best ideas for free.

For free? If you’re like most people, you’re thinking, “but I should charge for my best ideas!” But I’ll ask you, does the fisherman worry over giving up the sardine on a hook to catch a yellow-fin tuna? Of course not! He sees that he’s investing in a much larger prize. This is how you should think of it as well.

Your great ideas become a wide net that keep you top of mind. As a trusted thought-leader, people will think to come to you when they need your service. And when their friends share that they’re having tree and yard issues, your customers will recommend you. What makes it so successful is that customers will take your great ideas and think, “wow, I’d love my house to look like theirs” and it will lead them directly back to your services. It’s a cycle.

You can look and see great content marketers are all around you. The local farm-to-table restaurant that posts Instagram pictures of their most mouth-watering dishes keeps diners coming back hungry. The painting service that sends postcards with home-improvement tips that inspires people to repaint their exterior. Examples abound, and it’s easy to get into because nobody is more of an expert about your business than you. Share that expertise and reap the revenue rewards!

For you, your outreach channels can be newspaper articles, blog posts, product spec sheets, social media posts, emails, radio spots, event booths, podcasts, and more. There are unlimited venues for you to share your ideas with an audience who will eventually be led to buy.

So now that you’re convinced that you want to get into content marketing and “fish with a net,” how do you get started? Here are 5 simple steps. 

1. Know where to cast your net. Begin with defining your audience. What are you an expert in? And who wants to hear about it? If you’re a general repairman, new home owners would love to hear about maintenance tips. If you’re an interior designer, people would love get inspired by photos of your great work. If you’re an insurance agent, people would love to hear financial advice and tips on the sort of long-term planning that we all love to put off. Whatever your business, there’s a niche market of customers that would deeply value your expertise and this is the audience you should create content for.
2. Cast a wide net. No fisherman would drop their net straight down and hope that the right fish were under the boat, would they? Good fisherman recognize that there’s some uncertainty around where the right “fish” are, so they cast a wide net. For you, this means not limiting yourself to a blog but sending direct mail campaigns, posting on social media, “flyering” the neighborhood, and encouraging word-of-mouth. Different people have different preferences for consuming content. Your young professionals probably commute in the car and thus listen to podcasts. Your homeowners can best be reached where they live. Be in lots of places at once, and be consistent in your message across them.
3. Weave a strong net. If you cast a poorly made net that’s loose, it doesn’t matter how many fish it reaches, they’ll all pass right on through. You need to craft a strong net and in content marketing, this means writing truly useful content. If it’s uninteresting, people will ignore it. Invest some time in learning to craft good headlines and having a hook. Beta-test your content on friends and family and be completely open to feedback. Strong, truly valuable content will keep people coming back for more.
4. Remember to draw the net in. Now that you’ve cast your net around an audience and they’re interested, remember to pull it up! In marketing, this means having clear calls to action that direct your prospects to buy. It can be a phone number, landing page, an address, or an e-commerce site. Let them know how to move forward if they’re interested.
5. Repair the net frequently. One of the great things about the net is its reusable! That excellent article that you wrote for your blog can be chopped up into several great tweets and maybe a postcard or two. But it can only be reused up until a point and when it starts to feel stale, it starts to work against you. People need fresh content and so you should be doing something new at least every week, whatever that means for your business.

Are you feeling the call of the sea yet? We’ve covered how to identify your audience, reach out across many channels, write truly useful content, include a call-to-action, and to repeat the process weekly. The fish are out there in great schools and it takes content-marketing strategy to go out there and catch more than you hoped for.

If you’re ready to cast your first net, hop aboard and dial us at 877-222-6010 or jump straight into postcard marketing using our simple campaign builder!

What are psychographics?

Let’s say that you run a smoothie shop, and you’ve just run several Google Adwords campaigns for your nutritional weight loss smoothies. You’ve spent a healthy amount of money on it and you’re getting some clicks, but nobody is actually coming into the store to buy anything. What gives?

The simple answer is that you may be targeting your customers in the wrong way. How could that happen? Because you might not know them as well as you think just yet. You may have some really good demographic data on them like gender, age, and income, but you’re going to need psychographic data as well.

Psychographics are details about what people think or who they aspire to be. Often, this is a better predictor of why they will buy. Why? Because it reveals their detailed preferences. Two middle-aged and married homeowners who are demographically identical could have vastly different psychographic data and require different marketing. Don’t abandon demographics however, because you’ll need both to form what is called a complete buyer persona. 

Demographics

• Gender
• Age
• Marriage Status
• Income

Psychographics

• Concerns
• Lifestyle
• Habits
• Opinions
• Values

Getting to the buyer persona

When you can combine factual data like where people live, their income, and their age with subjective data like their beliefs, values, habits, and lifestyle, you create a buyer persona that can come to life.

It’s the difference between marketing to Suzy, Female, aged 31 who makes $75k/year and marketing to Suzy the advertising manager who’s interesting in digital marketing, is in a long-term committed relationship, volunteers at the Red Cross, and whose guilty pleasure is binge-watching crime dramas on Netflix. One of those Suzies seems like a statistic while the other feels like a living, breathing person who we could market to.

What products of yours do you think Suzy would be interested in? That’s the level of detail that we’re trying to get to.

I want psychographics. How do I go about gathering them? 

To gather psychographics, the best place to start is with your best customers! Ask them for a brief interview and find out why they bought, why they’re happy (or aren’t), where else they shop, and what their top day to day concerns are. Get to know them a little better as people and take notes. Ask how their weekend was, how their kids are doing, and what movies they watch. Take note of everything because it’s often surprising what’s useful later on.

Next, interview your customer service associates or anyone who deals with customers on a daily basis. Ask them to theorize on who their typical customers are, who the best ones are, and what they all care about.

Have you discovered anything surprising? Take the questions you’ve now raised and craft a brief multiple-choice survey (6-10 questions is ideal) for the rest of your customer base. Surveys work well in-person but even better online with tools like SurveyMonkey. If you want to guarantee good results, offer a gift card drawing. Here are some sample questions:

• What are your interests?
• What do you like to do on your days off? 
• What is the toughest decision you’ve had to make in the last month? 
• What books have you read recently? 
• When you purchase your product, what problem did it help you solve? 

As answers start flowing in, you now have a database of psychographic information that you can start incorporating this in your marketing. Take some time reviewing the data and writing out several customer personas like the one above for Suzy. They don’t need to be more than a few sentences, but they’ll help guide your decision making for the next step.

Where do I best reach my customers?

Returning to our example of Suzy, we now know that Suzy is 31 and a millennial, so she’s probably savvy with technology. She’s also interested in digital marketing, which means that she probably knows a lot about how Google Adwords works. Why isn’t AdWords capturing her attention? It’s because she knows she can avoid them with a service like AdBlocker and doesn’t ever see them! 

Now is when we need to re-evaluate the Adwords campaign. Maybe, a direct mail marketing campaign will be much more effective at reaching her because it will actually get through and stand out. Make this one change and voila! Psychographics have saved the day, and “Suzy” and people like her are walking in your smoothie shop doors asking about the two-for-one discount.

Psychographics are often what’s missing

The most successful marketing happens with good data. As you can see, psychographics are some of the most valuable data that you can gather from your customers. Going forward, collect it on a more regular basis. Teach your customer service team what it is, why it’s important, and how to report interesting facts about patrons. You can incorporate surveys into your online shopping experience. And you can go the extra mile and go through an agency to conduct focus groups.

All of this should lead you to one question: what don’t I know about my customers right now? You have the tools, you just need to go and collect it.

If you’re interested but too busy, Opportunity Knocks Marketing can give you direct access to psychographic data on millions of consumers in your area, and help you run marketing to them. Give them a call at 877-222-6010 and get started right now!

You don’t have to be a graphic artist to do marketing

Don’t consider yourself an artist? Few people do, but don’t let that hold you back from marketing! Your fear of not being “creative” enough for marketing is completely unfounded and we’ll tell you why: all we do is marketing, and we’re not very good artists either.

Sure, our design team is world-class, but that’s not what drives sales. We like to rely on data to make our marketing decisions. We’re always testing testing testing, and have done so over millions of postcard sends (some of them, yes, by real artists) for the past twenty years.

Good SMB marketers are a jack-of all trades

Over that time what has become clear is that to be a good small-business marketer and to make more sales with a direct mail marketing campaign, you just need to be a really good generalist.

A generalist? Sure. We’ve found that the biggest winners are the generalists. At very large Fortune 1000 companies specialists can afford to get tunnel vision around a project and spend weeks designing a single flyer. Not so here, where small and medium business owners are juggling a host of competing responsibilities. Your business would suffer terribly if you swept everything aside to compose the perfect photo series. A generalist however can get in, get it done, and move on, and they tend to see the highest response rates and sales. In short, you don’t have to be an artist to be good at marketing.

Here’s how you know you’re a highly effective generalist:

1. Business – do you know the value of your business to the customer?
2. Marketing – can you give prospects social proof by letting your customers speak for you?
3. Design – when the time comes, can you choose an effective image over a pretty one?
4. Timing – can you lay down the law with a deadline?

If you’re sitting there nodding your head thinking, “duh,” this is what I do all day, then great! Click here and get started with a direct mail campaign, and don’t even bother with the rest of this. But if you’re curious and want to see how the pros do it, read on.

Designing your own unique and powerful postcard really is as shockingly simple as touching on these four points: 

1. Create your value proposition. Why should the customer buy from you? There’s plenty of other competing businesses out there, you need to select the single thing that sets you apart and make it the headline of your postcard. I know what you’re thinking, “but there are hundreds of reasons!” which may be true, but remember, when someone opens the mailbox you’ve got one big first impression to make. Avoid blowing it with a “busy” design that tries to tell them everything you do.

The famous line is, “If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter,” which is to say, it’s tough editing it all down to one thing! But based on how postcard campaigns with just one big value proposition perform, it’s entirely worth the work. Cut it down to just one and go with it!

2. Social Proof. If you haven’t seen our primer on using psychology in postcard marketing, it’s worth a glance. Social proof puts your potential customers at ease because it shows that others have tried your services and been delighted.

Just think, you wouldn’t trust a new babysitter who walked in off the street and was a complete stranger, would you? Of course not. You choose one who you know, probably the son or daughter of a friend, and whom has successfully babysat before. What you’re trying to establish is his or her credentials. The same is true in direct mail marketing, where you have to show the customer very quickly that you’re trustworthy. So let your happy customers do the talking and pepper the card with testimonials and statistics about customer satisfaction!

3. Get flashy – its finally time to create some visual drama! Because your postcard is only so big and you can only write so much, don’t skimp on the pictures, as they speak volumes. Where do you get those photos? Use stock ones! This is the great inside secret of the industry, and who wouldn’t want to draw from the work of professional photographers? Any good direct-mail vendor will help you choose from an array of photos and give you templates so that you know where to place them. But which photos do you choose? That’s where the generalists excel.

Oddly enough, people who don’t know a lot about photography actually do better with this. This seems counter intuitive, whereas real artists will focus on picture composition and light quality, which are great to have, generalists will focus on the big picture (no pun intended) and use images that tell a story about their value proposition.

Do you guarantee that you’ll remove stains? Show the couch! Do you restore old cars? Show your favorites! Generalists are pros at boiling it all down to one or two photos, say a before-and-after picture of someone with new flooring, a new yard, or a new vehicle. Once you’ve got those images, you’re done. On to the next step!

4. Create Deadlines. Great generalists know that sometimes it’s time to stop playing around and get tough. You’ve made the customer a great offer, but are you hard enough to hold them to it? Deadlines are a great selling tool because people really are driven by them: taxes, invoices, school registration, etc.

Just think back to your time in school (I know it’s been a while, it has for us as well). Did you ever do complete an assignment the day you received it? Heck no! You waited until the last hour of the last day. Your customers will as well, and if there’s no deadline, that postcard is going to get saved and lost. Compel them to act now and make them an offer they can’t refuse!

And there you have it. Feeling pretty good about your generalist skills? You should. Marketing is best done by those can get in, get the job done, and get out. They can hammer out a value proposition, gather testimonials, tell a story with two photos, stamp a deadline on it, and get back to their day.

I guess you didn’t realize it but by running your business, you’ve already prepared yourself with the skills you need to craft a powerful marketing campaign! Now the only thing left is to pick up the phone and dial 877-222-6010 to get that campaign out the door and watch the sales flow in! Remember, get in, get it done, and get on with your day.

Ahh, spring is in the air and the birds are chirping again. Or is it fall, and the leaves are changing colors? Or have the first flakes of snow now fallen and as you scrape across the icy sidewalk in your winter galoshes? (Or if you’re a Californian, you’re asking ‘what are seasons?’)

My point is that everyone notices when the seasons change. It’s universal, and it’s part of our biological clock.

Why am I going on about this? Am I merely waxing poetic about the changing of the seasons? Of course not! If you know Opportunity Knocks Marketing and this blog by now, it’s all about the marketing tips that can be gleaned from this insight. In this case, you can leverage the seasonality of your customer’s needs to better target them with postcard campaigns!

Why do seasons give us reasons?

The seasons can tell you a great deal about what people are going through, or about to go through, and you can thus appear to be downright prophetic in your recommendations to them. And as well all know, the more targeted you can be, the more effective you’ll be. In many cases, you can double your ROI on a campaign. According to Forbes, personalization can increase sales by as much as 10%. What would you do with that extra money?

Here is how our most successful customers align their marketing with the seasons:

1. Spring cleaning: Once its springtime and the grasses are growing green, people are coming out of their proverbial winter caves and thinking about being outdoors again! This means that they’re pulling out last season’s clothes, trimming their yards, planning neighborhood gatherings, and anticipating full-blown summer. How can you best advertise to them?

• Spring trips: For many, Spring Break is time to get out. Advertise trips, travel destinations, home alarm systems, and doggie day-care for while they’re gone!
• Wardrobe changes: People want sun and it’s sure to leave it’s mark. They’ll need protection with hats, sunscreen, sunglasses, and flip-flops. And on the flip-side, they no longer need their coats and skis, so it’s time to talk about storage units, consignment, and house-cleaning.
• Festivals: Millennials are really feeling the summer love and festivals have become big business. Cater to this market with far-out clothing, camping gear, and RV rentals.
• Tax season: Not a fun time, but a trigger event nonetheless! People will be interested in accounting, legal, banking, and document storage services.

2. Summer fixing: Summer has hit and the sun is sweltering. People are thinking about how best to enjoy themselves and stay cool. They’re likely taking a few out of town trips, and they’re definitely investing more in their yard to make it a great, shady gathering place.

• Vacations: With the kids out of school, it’s time to haul everyone off on a road trip to the Grand Canyon or hop on a plane to Fiji. Advertise road-trip car inspections, electronics, play devices for the kids, insurance, and travel services.
• The outdoors: People will spend more time outside, both in their yards and in the national parks. It’s time to help them break out cooler clothes, hiking boots, and anything they need for a BBQ like better lawn chairs, a fire pit, solar panels, and pool cleaning services.
• That one backyard project: Every family has that one project, that gazebo started last season that hasn’t been worked on. They’ll never be more interested in your help with it than right now!

3. Autumn “squirreling”: People are trying to get the most of everything in Autumn. This is the time that the sun has sunk lower in the sky, the days are growing shorter and people are anticipating the trials that winter (or school or the holidays) will bring.

• Back to school: Students dread it, retailers love it! Cash in on the must-have clothing, books, writing supplies, sports equipment, tutoring, and transportation arrangements.
• Holidays: They’re coming up quickly and decorations are in order; everything from pumpkins to fir trees. Catch people early with services to make decorating and un-decorating totally hands-free and they’ll love you for it.
• Sports frenzy: NFL season begins and across the USA and millions of folks are suddenly going to be glued in groups to the TV. It’s a social event, so now is the time to strike with offers for a more spacious couch, snacks, new TV and phone packages, and of course taxi services.

4. Winter heating: The real chill has set in and people are bundling up at home with family. They’re prepping for the holidays and thinking about being thankful for the people in their lives, and are looking for great bargains on gifts.

• Home remodeling: With all that time indoors, people invariably get to thinking about that old floral wallpaper that they never quite loved. Advertise remodeling or decoration services! They’re also very aware of how much they’re paying for heating, so advertise energy-saving appliances and weather-proofing!
• Gift season: They say to always sell value, not price, but this is time to appeal to both people’s values and their wallets! Nothing strains a budget like buying gifts for the whole family and nothing helps a buyer be generous like a really good deal. Advertise those holiday deals!
• Trip planning: People are moving about the country and stress levels are about to hit their zenith as everyone takes to the skies to visit home! Think about how you can make their lives easier, from more comfortable flights to shipping services to games and meal ideas for the family.

The circle begins again: no, there’s no fifth season here, unless you count the beginning of the next year. Seasons are a cycle! If you’ve done it correctly and you’re consistent, customers will actually start to associate those powerful seasons with your services, and that’s a great place to be.

Tips

If it’s working, make it a habit. Pin this season’s successful marketing campaign cards on the calendar for the next few years and keep track of the ones that worked best!

Hopefully you’re chock-full of seasonal ideas and have noticed that Spring officially begins on March 20th! Plant your springtime seeds for success and get started on a mailing or call 877-222-6010 to talk to a helpful “flowers and may showers” marketing expert and get your marketing rolling!

Was YOUR Name Drawn?

Wow! A big thanks to all our amazing contestants this past month! We had some terrific entries – and we thank you all so much for sharing your ProspectPLUS.com experiences! If your name wasn’t drawn – no worries!  We’ll choose another WINNER, April 5th!  Congratulations everyone!

Our $250 Winner is Peter Koukounas, who shared:

“I was never a big fan of postcard marketing until Jim and his team made me a firm believer in the benefits of this marketing approach. Just from 1 run, the amount of leads and signed agreements have paid for this campaign and future campaigns 10 fold. The design, professionalism and approach that Jim and his team came up with was spot on and we will now be doing campaigns on a monthly basis. Any company looking to do postcard marketing would be doing a disservice to their company by not partnering with Jim and his team for their marketing needs.”

Thanks Peter!  You now have a $250 gift card to use on our DIY postcard marketing website here or on a custom postcard marketing campaign through our sister company, Opportunity Knocks here.

Thank you to everyone who entered! Ready to throw your hat in the ring? It’s easy!  Leave your review of your ProspectsPLUS.com product or service on our Google+ Page or our sister company’s Facebook Page today!  We’ll give away a $250 Postcard Marketing Gift Card! Next drawing is April 5th.

We’d also like to invite you to join us in our goal to raise $50,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital®! We are matching every donation this year, dollar-for-dollar! Learn more at: blog.prospectsplus.com/st-jude

And if you’re in the mood to see what’s NEW – head over to our Specials Page and see all the new marketing tools for March and nab your 10% savings promo codes!

Do you ever run into someone at a party who likes to ramble? Who starts telling a story and halfway through you’re wondering, “where are they going with this?”

Now think about what they make you want to do: find a quick exit or somehow finagle them onto another unsuspecting guest. It seems pretty obvious that rambling doesn’t draw people in, right? Well this is exactly what you are doing with your website if it’s not optimized to drive leads.

And every visitor that “bounces” becomes someone else’s customer!

Creating a good website actually becomes harder the more you know about your business.  Most owners fall victim to what Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the book Made to Stick, call “the curse of knowledge.” This is when you know so much about a subject that it’s difficult to say it simply. When your website is filled with too many things it becomes intimidating and suddenly you’ve become that rambling party guest.

What we need here is a reset on what really matters. Your website exists to drive more traffic to your business, so here are 4 tactics that can help you clear the way to do so:

#1 – Say things more simply.

Don’t think you can say things more simply than you already are? Think again. Even a giant company like ADP who has literally thousands of products manages to explain what they do in just seven words.

Pretty impressive, right? If they can do it, so can you.

A great exercise for this is to try to explain what your business does to a small child. The younger the better. Grab a niece or nephew and ask them to explain it back to you, and through several attempts you’ll start to realize that there are many unanswered, “why?” questions that you had assumed were obvious. To your customers however, they aren’t. This will help you transform, “Experienced industrial metalwork and fabrication contractors” into “Your local metalwork experts.” Simple can be beautiful, right?

How do I get more people to my now simpler website?

You’ve heard the term “SEO” bandied around, no doubt, maybe even as someone’s title followed by the word “expert.” At its simplest, Search Engine Optimization is how Google (and other search engines) gauge how valuable your site is. The more valuable, the higher it ranks on the list when people search for you.

Pro Tip: visit www.similarweb.com or hook up Google Analytics to see how many visitors your site is currently getting.

The key to having good SEO is to have a well-organized site full of keywords that your customers are searching for. While simplifying your messaging, you should also focus it so that the keywords are used consistently throughout. Don’t just write this one in! Spend some quality time on it (or hire a freelance writer), as Google’s algorithm can spot a fake and it will hurt your score.

Great work so far, but are you feeling impatient waiting for Google to discover how great your new site is? There’s always paid advertising where you can have ads for your site placed around the web. It costs money, but it’s a guaranteed way to get things rolling. Google’s Adwords service can come off as a little complex to the layperson so it never hurts to talk to an expert before getting started.

#2 – Getting them to take an action

Now that people are knocking down the proverbial doors to your website, waste no time in directing them to a “call to action” or CTA, like this:

The most effective lead-generation websites have a homepage with one large picture, a single sentence, and one or two buttons. Just take a look at Opportunity Knocks Marketing for a good example. Visitors have just two choices: get started or learn more. See what a vast departure this is from a website homepage full of hundreds of options? Here, your prospects clearly understand what you do, and can waste no time contacting you.

This sort of simplicity is possible because again, we’ve clearly defined our objectives: get people to fill out a form so that we can call them. Know your own objective, for example an eCommerce site would direct them to a store, but it always starts with a call to action.

#3 – Leveraging their contact info in other campaigns

Always use forms for collecting information. Too often I see good websites that direct people to a page that just lists an email or a phone number. Why leave it up to the customer to get in touch with you? If you instead use a form you not only take the initiative to reach out to them but you also capture their information for future use.

Several of our customers use their online forms to collect people’s addresses or zip codes which then allow them to send them postcard campaigns which see even higher engagement than typical email, meaning that they’re getting a higher ROI for the website that they already have. Pretty neat trick, huh?

#4 – Clear the runway for takeoff

You’ve come leaps and bounds from where we started. You now realize that by trying to say too many things on your website, you can end up saying virtually nothing. And now that we’ve been able to redefine your objective for the website around generating leads for your business, everything has gotten a lot simpler. Your messaging is clear enough that a five-year old can explain it to you, you’ve got traffic to your website, and you’re directing all of them straight to a form. Now we are in business!

There’s always more to learn, and if you’re finally ready to see some revenue from postcard marketing, call us today at 877-222-6010 and talk to an expert about how you can drive more leads!