In today’s office equipment market, your B2B or B2C customer is both connected and informed. A marked shift in buying behavior from in-person to online has been driven by constantly evolving access to digital resources and information. With so much data at your customers’ fingertips, the power is clearly in their hands to select providers from a multitude of choices.
That’s why today’s top-performing businesses understand the power of online marketing, beginning with websites.
To be an effective marketing tool that drives sales, your website should reflect every aspect of your brand—from your corporate image to your unique selling proposition (USP)—and provide an unparalleled online customer experience.
Whether you’re marketing to a loyal customer base, trying to reach new markets or grabbing additional market share from the competition, you need a website that educates customers and prospects alike, and escorts them to your sales funnel.
Successful dealer websites have a design that emphasizes lead generation and optimization across all devices to make it easy for both customers and search engines to find what they need.
Winning Ways to Supercharge Your Website
Today’s businesses use a variety of tools to increase lead generation and amplify inbound traffic through their websites. Some of the most common—and impactful—are listed below.
1. Blogging—the Motherlode of Content
Blogging is the bread-and-butter of website marketing. But in today’s aggressive online marketplace, you can’t just slap any content up on your site and expect to compete. There are 4.4 million blog posts published every day, so your content must stand out, educate and compel your visitors to action.
Lead-generating content needs to be valuable and useful to your customers and touch on their pain points where possible. That’s why pillar posts and topic clusters are perfect ways to generate traffic to your blog.
A pillar post is one that’s substantial in content, engaging and, above all, actionable. It’s often accompanied by videos, infographics or even audio files to drive interest. And, because it’s normally chock-full of evergreen (i.e., always useful) material, it has longevity, bringing your visitors back again and again for reference. Those return visitors, that traffic, is what signals Google and other search engines to rank your site higher.
Another way to drive traffic and maximize search engine optimization (SEO) is by setting up topic clusters around that pillar post. So, you’d blog on various topics related to your pillar and link those entries back to the pillar—and to each other—for maximum benefit.
Smart businesses with a strong online presence understand that frequency and consistency are the keys to getting more traffic on your site and keeping visitors interested once they’re there. Data from multiple studies shows that publishing content two to four times per week gives you the best results if you’re looking for more traffic and higher conversion numbers.
Finally, savvy businesses cast their marketing nets wide, and include vertical markets in their blogging plan when reaching for increased saturation.
2. Social Media—Keeping Connected in a Distracted World
Five hundred and seventy five million people in the world have a LinkedIn account, with 40% of them accessing the platform every day.
And LinkedIn is just one of many social media outlets, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, that businesses can leverage to grow revenue. The fact that people are using these platforms many times per day makes social media a must-have for businesses looking to connect and engage with their audiences.
But what does social media have to do with your website? Top online marketers suggest all of your social accounts should be unified with consistent branding and have backlinks to your website to spur that inbound traffic.
The more solid and personal your connections are with your clients, the easier it is to turn prospects into sales.
3. Video—Better Than a Thousand Words
Eighty-seven percent of businesses use video as a tool for marketing to customers.
Maybe that’s because 79% of people say a brand’s video convinced them to buy an app or software, and 96% say they’ve watched an “explainer” video to learn more about services or products. Embedding videos on your website is easy, and if you host them on YouTube, it also gives you access to an additional social media fan base, effectively doing double duty for your marketing campaign.
There is a wide variety of content that may be right for your target audience:
- Brand and event videos
- Expert interviews and case study videos
- Educational, how-to, demo and explainer videos
- Animated videos
- Customer testimonials
- Live videos
- VR and augmented reality videos
- Personalized message videos
Videos should be carefully planned by marketing staff, then scripted and shot using high-quality cameras, good lighting and high-quality sound. Editing is critical, and should be accomplished by an expert.
If possible, they should not be hosted on your website to ensure they don’t bog down your site’s load time. Slow loading is a commerce killer. Nearly half of consumers expect a page to load in less than two seconds and 40% of those who encounter a website that takes three seconds to load, abandon it. A one-second delay can cause a seven percent reduction in sales conversions, so periodically test your website’s speed, with or without videos, across all devices from desktop to mobile.
4. Email Series—the First Step in the Funnel
Smart marketers give website visitors what they want, and technology helps to pave the way—specifically, email automation technology. Using autoresponders, you can create an email series of high-quality curated content to help onboard and funnel clients through your website to make a sale.
In a nutshell, site visitors trade you their email addresses in exchange for actionable tips, exciting content or useful information. That triggers a series of emails that help customers get on board with your products or services.
Emails can be triggered by specific actions, or even inaction, to firmly guide inbound customers. Understanding your customers’ behavior online can help fine-tune your email series for better results and higher revenue. That’s where data marketing automation comes in.
5. Data Marketing Automation—Unscrambling Consumer Behavior
Data marketing automation and technology helps businesses drive leads, increase conversions and capture sales with less work by fully understanding customer behavior.
Automation offers a way to increase productivity while the “data” part of this equation pinpoints customer analytics. Those analytics are evaluated to target the most-effective online strategies for improving customer communication and increasing sales. This is accomplished by identifying customer activity surrounding your content to determine marketing activities that will most likely generate new sales leads.
6. Putting it All Together—the Importance of Partnering
Whether you have a website marketing strategy that you’re looking to fine-tune or you’re just starting out, many businesses find it advantageous to partner with a company that can assist in perfecting your website and/or online marketing strategy. These companies can provide the tools you don’t already have in-house, including a writing staff and data-marketing automation.
However, if you choose this option, it’s critical to look for a partner that has an intimate understanding of your business or industry, and has the resources to support your company’s marketing needs in the long term.
Drive New Business with a Strong Web Presence
If you’re a progressive office equipment dealer interested in expanding business, increasing revenue and grabbing a larger share of the market, a strong website is critical to your marketing plan. However, as one of over 1.5 billion websites in the world, smart dealers know that they need to establish trust and authority online before they can effectively drive sales.
Fortunately, the internet’s disruptive potential allows independent dealers to enter into direct competition with bigger companies if they’re willing to embrace technology and leverage their ability to connect on a personal level with customers.
Delivering a first-class online experience for potential customers is a critical element to backing up your high-quality products and services. Online consumers want solid, useful information; a seamless experience and easily managed online communication and transactions.
If you don’t have the expertise in-house, be sure to look for an industry-savvy marketing partner that understands how to optimize your web presence to amplify your inbound traffic and start generating strong, revenue-producing leads.
