Internet Marketing Blog | Search Consulting Service

I often get asked: How do I turn a website visitor into a paying customer?  I believe the question might be better framed as: How do I get customers/clients to visit our website? You will always get visitors who have no intention of buying your goods or services. The trick may not be to change these visitors into customers but to find more potential customers. To find a customer, consider offering them something they want, but that is not necessarily your product. And two, develop a relationship with them.

Often people don’t purchase from the low cost provider. Sometimes they don’t buy from the most convenient vendor. Instead customers often buy from the company that provides the best advise and has trained the buyer to be a discriminating buyers. This is true of the bike shop, the wine shop, or the consulting shop. On the web this advise is also called content.

The Web Offer

Follows is an example of offering a customer something they want that is not your product. I have a client who offers corporate strategic consulting services in a niche area. In order to differentiate potential clients visiting the website, from people interested in the service but not decision makers, we offered the potential client, a RFP template. No one but a potential customer would want this. But a potential customer will find a RFP very attractive. It could save them a lot of work trying to develop their own proposal. We also track who referred these RFP-interested visitors and then we altered the web advertising accordingly. The key is to think about who your customer is. In this case it wasn’t the CEO, it was the middle manager whose job it was to find potential consulting firms.

Developing Online Customer Relationships

There has been much written about developing online customer relationships. I believe that companies must become their industries thought-leaders. That is, they must become the “go-to” experts by providing quality content. Having a distribution mechanism like e-newsletters is critical. In fact, collecting email addresses on your website might be the single most important activity that you accomplish on your website. Often companies fail to place client-valuable content on their website like fact sheets, data sheets, old newsletters, and mixed media. A blog can also allow you to share your expertise, but this is a topic onto itself. Become the expert and the client relationship will follow.