After working with several small businesses over the years, I’ve found that there are three catastrophic mistakes that are seriously cutting into revenue.
- Creating boring content
- Not focusing on the buyer who just isn’t ready yet
- Competing on price
Exciting content isn’t necessarily content that is going to win an Emmy or an Oscar. Exciting content is content that can help solve a problem that your buyer has.
Exciting content gets shared much more freely than boring content. Very rarely will someone pass along information regarding a products features and benefits. But a web page that gives tips, instructions, and useful advice is much more likely to attract a large audience.
On a typical website, only 3% of all visitors are actually ready to buy right then and there. The other 97% of the visitors are made up of disqualified traffic and potential buyers. Assuming that marketing is being targeted to your potential buyers, there is a huge opportunity to increase sales, simply by converting potential buyers who have visited your website into buyers.
If the business competes as a commodity, then price is the only comparison that buyers will make. While some big businesses might be able to succeed by having the lowest prices, most small and mid-sized businesses cannot. Low prices mean low profit margins. If a vendor increases price by 5%, that may cannibalize an entire year worth of profit margins.
Today, I am hosting a FREE webinar that is guaranteed to increase your online sales by 10%; simply by modifying your existing website. You will receive a series of small, yet powerful ideas that will give you the most bang for your website dollars.
Date: Tuesday March 9
Time: 3PM – 4PM New York time
Where: Online. You can register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/547979112
I look forward to seeing you there.
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Another thing I see a lot of small business do is disregard tech safeguards that could, along with protecting their websites, really differentiate them in a crowded market. As a VeriSign evangelist I feel I should mention the new VeriSign Trust Seal, which provides authentication and on-going malware scanning for sites that don’t need SSL (it’s basically like extended validation ssl without the data point encryption). But there are many options SMBs can explore for protecting their customers’ private data. Good luck on your webinar, I’m sure it’ll be a hit!
Hi Joseph,
Thank you for the comment. The VeriSign Trust Seal is a huge sigh of relief when making a purchase or submitting any kind of personal information. Thank you very much for pointing this out.
regards,
Greg
You’re welcome, Greg! It is indeed always relieving to see the VeriSign logo when making a purchase.