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Work

The battle of the big Web Tools

by positiveadmin on November 4, 2010

You should know all about the value of SEO by now – after all, we have nagged and persuaded enough of you about the value of Search Engine Optimization. So it’s time to lift the lid on a couple of other vital online tools. Here we will show you how Conversion Rate Optimization (increasing website leads and sales without spending money on attracting more visitors) and Landing Page Optimization (rationalising every page on your site to lead inexorably to a conversion) can work together with SEO to boost organic search engine listing. In the race to reach the top of Google ranking, these three tools can whip your website along from an also ran seaside donkey, to a first past the post Red Rum.

Lets start with a few definitions:
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization
LPO – Landing Page Optimization

Assuming that you have taken our excellent advice, then you will have conducted a full SEO survey, removed any blockage to smooth search engine ranking, keyword stuffed every nook and cranny – so your website shines like a beacon for anyone remotely searching for the goods and services you provide. Consequently, Google Ranking and website traffic are up and everyone is happy. That is until you look at the Analytics and discover that the bounce rate is higher than expected – visitors aren’t staying and your ‘Click Through Rate’ is less than impressive. Worse still, there are no conversion goals so you can’t be certain how much business is being generated through your site.

That’s when the next step needs to be taken. You have the visitors you need – there’s no point in putting money into attracting more traffic. It’s much better to concentrate on converting those visitors into real customers. CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization, is the process of increasing website leads and sales without spending money on attracting more visitors. It is the art and science of persuading site visitors to take actions that benefit you, by making a purchase, or committing to some positive future action.

That is accomplished by looking at, and adjusting, the relevance of your landing pages to the search terms people are using. Basically, whatever they are searching for should be immediately apparent at first glance. If it’s not, then you risk an immediate ‘bounce’ and all the time, effort and money that has gone into attracting them in the first place is lost. Optimization is focused on creating clear paths from relevancy, to the visitor reaching a desired conversion goal and thereby becoming a customer. Whoopee!

CRO uses a wide variety of techniques, including persuasive copywriting and credibility-based web design, to convert prospects into buyers. By planning, designing, and optimizing your website to persuade, you can ensure that it will act as a more efficient sales tool.

To ensure this is working means testing which headlines, images and content help to convert more visitors into customers. Your landing pages need to be spot on, and that’s the job of LPO – more of which later.

The Benefits of CRO
The importance of CRO becomes clear in light of the poor performance of unoptimized e-commerce websites with average conversion rates of between 2.5% and 3.1%. High-quality CRO optimization can increase conversion rates by 50% to 200% or even more. How is it done?

Build the path to the conversion point
All the steps, from a visitor arriving at your landing page, need to work together to bring the visitor toward the ultimate goal. However, with a website the start point isn’t always the home page. Visitors arrive at different points; wherever the search engine dropped them. This could be the home page, product page, testimonial page, informational page, an article, or anywhere else.
This makes building the path to the conversion a bit more challenging, but it can be done. Now here’s the problem. Offers and products will change frequently – so how can you build the flexibility and the careful targeting you need, without costing a fortune in frequent re-programming, to maximise conversions?

LPO, or Landing Page Optimization
Traditional LPO goes back to first principles, rationalising every page on your site to lead inexorably to a conversion. However, this is costly and time consuming. This is where smart thinking comes in. Who said that the landing pages for Adwords or marketing campaigns need to be on your website? What if they were hosted elsewhere, created quickly and easily for any customer group or product offer that comes along?

That’s right, we have a bit of kit that can run out an external set of landing pages designed to channel customers through very simple yet attractive steps to sets of desired conversions. Quick, easy and ready to respond to changing markets, Positive Advertising can turn visitors into customers – and track every online and telephone response generated so you can see the true value of the service. See our article The value of Targeted Landing Pages for the full picture.

So who should you support in the battle of the initialisms – SEO, CRO, LPO? The answer is all of them because, if you’re going into battle for customer acquisitions, then you’ll need all the big battalions working together.

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Integrated communication helps to Drive JT Hughes forward

by positiveadmin on September 15, 2009

JT Hughes Drive Newsleter

Every year new car dealers are faced with a summer Catch-22. August is traditionally a peak time for car dealers, when buyers are eager to get their hands on the new 59 registration plates. August is also peak holiday time, when many of those eager buyers are toasting themselves a deep Ferrari Red on some over populated Costa. In order to overcome this problem, dealers seem instinctively driven to hurl a hefty wodge of their annual marketing budget against the (often fruitlessly) wall of tactical advertising. The idea is that, if they hurl enough moolah, some of it is bound to stick and, consequently, some of those buyers, not currently Ferrari toasting, will come to them with open arms – albeit very sore open arms. This is not strategy, this is desperation.

So what is the alternative? Do nothing we said. That’s right, sit on your tush and wait until September. What, you cry, and lose all those eager August buyers to other dealers? We said look, Mr client sir, the eager ‘must have an August plate’ buyers will be banging on your door long before the due August date, so all that expenditure will do is pick up a few waifs and strays – probably not much more than an average month. YOU ARE WASTING YOUR MONEY!

Instead we suggested piling the effort into end of August beginning of September. By then the lobsters will be back from the Costa, turning a nice chestnut brown, chilled and receptive to an informed soft sell and a good deal. So we put together an integrated campaign. Firstly we produced a newsletter ‘Drive’ with a difference – it looked good.

Some people have doubts about the usefulness of a newsletter in today’s marketing mix. If the entire newsletter consists of trying to offload ancient spares, ‘breaking-news-in-depth-features’ on young Jasper’s Advanced NVQ Diploma in ‘Head Gasket Maintenance’ and a few grainy thumbnail snaps of desperate to unload jalopies, that co-incidentally happen to be clogging up the forecourt – then they would be right. However, a well-designed newsletter (with strategic thought behind it) can help to differentiate a product or service from those of competing businesses. But that only holds true if it forms part of an integrated approach – a part, not the whole.

Drive magazine spread

Drive Magazine featured editorial DPS features (with large format photography) all about the benefits of the latest Honda, Mitsubishi and SEAT model ranges. Notice we say benefits, not features. The articles were an appraisal of the economic savings in running costs and taxation (and the environmental benefits) that new models offer over old. Building desire you see. What it didn’t feature were any prices, nothing, not a hint.

Now that their appetites were thoroughly whetted, the newsletter could move in for the kill – it contained an invitation to a Unique Car Event. This event contained an unusual proposal – come to the dealerships, find a new or used car, sit down with JT Hughes staff and make a realistic offer as a start point to negotiation. This had to handled very carefully to avoid the appearance of distress selling – which this most definitely was not. As further incentives, attendees were offered free ‘wash and vacs’ for their cars and those not interested in buying could have a half price MOT during the qualifying period. The idea was to drive traffic to the dealerships and get sales staff talking to customers. We encouraged the client to cross sell – meaning that sales and service staff would be mutually involved in negotiations, so if one side drops the ball, the other has a chance to catch it.

Of course, integration is the key to maintaining customer communication, so we backed Drive Magazine up with a targeted html mailer (worth collecting those email addresses) and finally placed a strategic full-page ad in the local press to target new business.

Drive magazine

Did it work? The numbers of time wasters were remarkably small, and once people had seen the cars, and a chance to haggle, a lot of deals were made. Don’t believe us? Well why not ask the client, Paul Tench, Dealer Principle of JT Hughes. “Although Drive Magazine is not designed as a tactical sales tool, the aspirational design and clear advice has gone down better than previous heavy-sell tactical newsletters. In fact we have sold an unprecedented number of vehicles as a direct result and that’s a real achievement in today’s difficult market. We couldn’t be more pleased.”

jt-newspaper-ad

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Nurse knows best!

by positiveadmin on September 10, 2009

NHS nurse recruitment poster

If you have read the Healthcare Recruitment Drive article you’ll know that we have been busy with an NHS recruitment drive for Healthcare Assistants based at the Royal Shrewsbury and Princess Royal Hospitals. That worked so well that all placements were filled within days. Now, as any patient knows, when the medicine works you go back for more. So a healthy and happy client gave us a crack at a campaign to boost recruitment of qualified nurses. This was a little trickier as we were targeting distinct groups:

• Nurses wanting to return after a career break;

• Nurses commuting to hospitals outside the county;

• Nurses coming up to full qualification and looking for a first job.

Now that’s a lot of separately targeted messages to get into a 40 second radio ad, a set of associated posters and leaflets. Naturally we kept to the successful ‘split’ format and a strapline of Come Back to Nursing in Shropshire – and this time we got to feature a real nurse.

Did it work, well let’s see what the client had to say.

‘I just want to reiterate how incredibly impressed everyone has been with the materials:

• The materials were worthy of a national campaign;

• The posters and banners lifted the whole event;

• We’ve been involved in something that we’re incredibly proud of;

• Both David Wright MP and the mayor of Shrewsbury (who attended for photo ops) were amazingly impressed with the professionalism of the events (which the display materials made a significant contribution to).

Overall, the radio advertising for the HCAs was the major success. This hit our target audience right on the button, reaching them in ways that our traditional advertising and recruitment does not. The main lesson for us was that we weren’t quite ready for how successful it turned out to be!

With my kindest regards,

Adrian Osborne

Head of Communications and Business Development

The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust’

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