The ideas I advocate for adoption regarding use of a Web Marketing System (WMS) to cost-effectively generate sales leads WORK – though not overnight.
That’s why over a decade after I conceived it, not only am I succeeding in using it to boost my name/brand recognition (and sales) – but I’m also helping clients use it to do the same thing.
In this article I reproduce the text of a one page educational message I sent – seven years ago (on 11th January 2010) – to the CEO of a Real Estate firm, following formal handover of a Web Marketing System (WMS) I’d setup for them.
The company had been in business for over 15 years and had offices in Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt.
After training the assigned personal (the PA/Secretary), I was stepping back, to allow them begin managing the WMS by themselves, while I provided support as needed on an intermittent basis, until it was no longer needed.
I share it here for the potential benefit of real estate investors and professionals who may be looking for ideas about how to better promote opportunities to buyers.
===Starts===
This document is produced for the records. The following are important considerations you need to make as you take delivery of your website.
Your WMS will be driven a Web Marketing Strategy – which is a step by step outline of tasks you will carry out daily, weekly, etc to keep your website working optimally too bring you new potential sales leads.
What you need is a WMS – which comprises elements that make your website do the following:
- Make visitors contact you via your phone, email and other channels I create e.g. contact forms etc.
- Make potential customers – fitting your target audience profile – find your website via search engines i.e. your search engine visibility increases.
- Make visitors become subscribers to your email marketing newsletter.
- Give your company superior leverage in the minds of potential customers via Power Positioning™. The way I make your website RESPONSE GENERATING via the WMS I create will cause you to have dramatic increase in name recognition offline and online.
What You Knew Matters – But Not As Much As What You Need to Learn
- Turn the equation around
Use your website to ensure 80% of new customers find you online by themselves and NOT because you gave them your card. Imagine – you cannot reach all possible customers. Let your WMS find more for you. It won’t hurt to let it.
- There is a NEW generation of prospective property buyers.
Many of today’s nouveau riche are younger, upwardly mobile and VERY technology friendly – they WILL not mind to use the net, if they see your offering there.
That YOU are the expert in your field is not in doubt. However, certain changes in the demographics of potential customers in your market make it imperative that you adopt a WMS and NOT just a website.
- The most important goal of a website is to make people contact you.
That is to generate potential sales leads. For it to do that, you MUST put up not just your sales information (like pictures and prices), BUT also offer a variety of CONTENT through different channels, that entices the visitors while on your website, to take action to do business with you.
Not everyone will be ready to buy when they visit your website!
Indeed we know that rarely do people buy anything on first contact. So, ensuring you can STAY in touch with people who come to your site, will enable you over time persuade them to buy.
Would it not be better if over a period of months, you build a database of email subscribers to whom you can ALWAYS send email notices via your website newsletter about your properties?
if you say YES, then it follows that you must be prepared to let your website incorporate functionalities that will transform it into a WMS for you – such as conspicuously displayed newsletter signup forms, etc.
I will end by saying that your website design constitutes less than 20% of what makes your web marketing system.
Things like newsletter marketing, article marketing, and search engine optimization are more crucial in importance for the success of your site. You will need to accept this, if you want your website to pay for itself (recall you WILL be paying money ANNUALLY to renew its hosting).
Please read through my 10 item code of ethics to understand why I chose to do this write-up. It is my way of adding value to you, informing you adequately so the choices you make will be guided by accurate insight.
===Ends===
I’ve learned from YEARS of experience never to take anything for granted in terms of ensuring that my clients understand what I’m doing for them, and what they should expect, in addition to what they need to do, to get the results we agree upon.
In order to make certain that nothing gets missed, I developed a habit of sending one page notes to inform, educate – and sometimes inspire! – my clients, along the above lines.
About 4 years ago, after I relocated to Benin Republic’s Cotonou, in April 2013, to reinvent my brand online, I added the uses of 10 to 30 minute voice notes which I sometimes send in place of the one page written guide notes.
Regardless of the format in which I send them, the purpose is always to get the client and myself thinking the same way, about what needs to be done, to make the Web Marketing System I deliver, WORK in ways that s/he would find satisfactory, for the long term