It is fascinating to work on starting this business up – trying to create a web site and a sales cycle for a business whose specialty is designing websites, designing sales cycles, etc. We need to nail this because it is kind of tough to be credible as an “expert” if your own efforts in the area are substandard, know what I mean?
The secret is to focus on the process first, the content second, and the “bells and whistles” last – the same as we would do for any client. At the front end, our basic process is to use SEO/SEM and social media marketing to generate traffic to our landing pages where we will offer free content (like white papers and short educational videos) to entice conversions (aka “prospects). We are then going to use auto-responders, html email templates, and additional interactivity like webinars to nurture prospects into qualified leads. At that point, the direct sales effort takes over and we start to interact with those qualified leads on a one-on-one basis.
After we run for a bit, we will be able to look at key performance metrics and then start to adjust our marketing appropriately. We’ll start to get a feel for how much traffic it takes to generate a prospect, how many prospects it takes to generate a qualified lead, and how many qualified leads it takes to generate a client. Understanding those factors will allow us to start adjusting our advertising budgets and to modify the offerings on our landing pages. We’ll test various approaches to see which work best.
That’s the beauty of implementing a process … it allows you to adjust individual variables to test and measure the results.