The Fallacy of Linear Sales Progression Online

I read an article recently about creating forward sales momentum with web site visitors. I love the concept.

The idea is to create site copy that leads users down a prescribed path toward a purchase. I was nodding my head in affirmation until the author stated that the path to a purchase is linear.

This is where the marketer who lives in the trenches of real life tells the marketing academic that he’s just wrong.

Momentum is great, and we should all strive to create forward momentum through our site navigation and copy.  The idea that users will follow a linear path to a purchase is just wishful thinking – nothing more.

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Search Engine Marketing vs. Radio for Local Advertising

I have just completed a three-month study testing the effectiveness of SEO and Google Adwords against radio advertising in generating quote requests for a consumer insurance product.  The test was contained to a market area of one city and surrounding areas.

The local radio budget was $13,000/month, and the campaign ran for approximately three months on three stations selected by the company’s ad agency as being representative of the target demographic. To allow the radio a fair chance to establish frequency, I began tracking the search marketing comparison at the start of the second month of radio advertising and am reporting on exactly two months of radio results data ($26,000 invested over the two months – not counting the cost of producing the ad).

The Adwords budget for the same local market increased over the period of the study from approximately $400/month to approximately $750/month. And the total SEO budget was approximately $2,000/month.

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Help Your Visitors to Sniff Around Your Web Site

You know when a web site isn’t working for you. The beauty of the web is that you don’t have to tolerate it for more than a second before you’re gone… on to another site that better meets your needs.

But what actually happened on that site you abandoned?  Maybe it just didn’t offer what you were looking for… or maybe it did, but failed to let you know.

We can quickly sense when we are on track to finding the content we’re looking for by detecting what some experts call the “scent” of information. As it turns out, people behave on web sites in a manner very similar to dogs sniffing around for food – or whatever else they’re looking for. We get on a particular scent trail and follow it.

So designing and writing the content of your web site around the idea of creating easy-to-follow scent trails is vital to your success online.

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What Do Your Customers REALLY want?

What do your customers really want from you? I’d classify this as an important question for any business. And today, I got a glimpse of something from which most of us can probably extract a valuable lesson.

A friend of mine who runs a thriving angel investor group in Virginia recently set up an account on the business networking site, LinkedIn. (If you don’t have one, you should probably think about it.) The other day, she challenged me to a race to see who could build a bigger network. She’s killing me.

One of the features that LinkedIn now offers is the ability to post a question to the community.  People answer publicly to establish credibility and domain expertise. So, as you might imagine, the answers tend to be thoughtful, well-articulated, and generally correct (or at least defensible).

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