Before you design your site, develop your site marketing, create your Adwords or Search Marketing ad copy, develop your landing pages, or lead optimize your site, define who you want to contact you. 

I mean clearly define who you want - your ideal customer.  Define your dream customers who think you are their dream supplier because you have exactly what they want and supply it exactly how they want it.  Actually, define three people.  They will similar but slighly different users of your product.  Describe them.  Where do they work?  What do they do?  Where do they live?  What do they really want from you?  Why and how do they want it? 

Defining and clarifying your target customer helps you speak to him through your site and your writing.  By knowing him, you will naturally develop your site around his habits, wants, needs, schedule, and preferences and he will recognize it.  When he meets you, he will feel the connection and be so glad to have found you, he will enthusiastically say, “I am so glad I found you.”  Sure, not everyone who calls you will say that but some will - really.  I have heard it myself and read it in contact forms.  These are your high margin customers who are ready to work with you. 

Of course you are not going to head out and redesign your entire site based on this idea but try it with one page and pay attention to the sales leads you generate from that page.  Depending on your niche, you might find that up to 75% of the customers who contact you for that product are like the person you designed for. 

Thank you for your comments. 

Employee Site Training
Part of developing a lead optimized website is to boost the level of knowledge your employees have about your website(s).  When employees know what the website contains they can use it save time, save money, sell products, or all of the above. 

Employees (inlcuding you) should know how to use the site and how to help other people use the site as well. To do this, they need to have a good working knowledge of your site’s content.  A common situation where knowledge of the website is helpful is when a customer (a lead) calls and asks if he can see a photograph of the product in which he is interested. Your salesperson should be able to quickly “walk” that visitor through the site over the phone with simple “click there then on that” directions. I go nuts when I hear an unknowing salesperson say, “Well, visit [manufacturer’s website] and…”  What?!! Those are OUR site visitors! We paid for the site, the SEO, the lead optimization, maybe even an Adsense ad for that one! The more your employees know the website, the better they will be able to use it to turn leads into sales - quickly. 

There are three times when employees should be trained on the navigation and use of the website.

• Site Launch – when the website is initially launched all affected employees should be trained about the content and uses of the website. 
• New Hires – New employees should be trained how they can be more successful employees by using the website.
• Updates and Additions – when there are updates or additions employees should be notified through effective and multiple communications such as an email followed up by a reminder at the next meeting. This is an excellent opportunity to give a “refresher course” in the website overall.

Without getting too warm and fuzzy, it should be mentioned that your communication will be more effective if you can structure your communcation based on how the information in the website will help your employees. 

Consider giving a quick test to your employees about the website in which they are tasked to find the answers to specific questions. It might be effective - and more fun - to do this as a game or competition in which a small prize (such as lunch on the boss) is given for the first three correct responses. Alternatively, you might just want to drill them with questions about where to find certain information.  Whatever training method you use, make sure your employees know how to use the website to find information quickly to save time in the office or to – the number one goal – increase sales. 

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Integrate with Your Current Campaigns

Take every opportunity to use your website to support your overall marketing campaign and vice versa. The website can be used to provide more detailed information or pricing or to generally engage the customer in your offerings. You might see television advertisements that say, “for more information go to www.toyota.com.” If you are currently running a large targeted campaign, give the specific page address for the campaign such as www.leadoptimize.com/book. Alternately, you can send them to your home page where you have clearly drawn attention to the promotion for those people who are looking for it and to attract others who have arrived by other means. In other words, make it easy for people to use your campaign integration. Customers should not know they are working within your campaign. Also, like we went over before - put your domain name on everything. Use your campaign to support your website as well.

Leads by Fax

You can offer your site visitors the option of sending their requests for quotes (RFQ) by fax using a pdf form or printable page of your site. Some of your customers might prefer using fax to send their initial requests but you should not expect a lot of fax traffic unless faxes are still largely the norm in your industry.

The greatest thing about fax leads is that you can control the layout of the information you need to qualify your leads and help them more quickly. The fax form should include spaces for their name, company, phone, email, address, and line items with quantities, descriptions, etc. The fax form should also contain a space for project descriptions or comments & questions. Ideally, your visitor will be able to fill out the fax form online (better legibility), print it, and fax it to you. You can also create a form they can print, fill out, and fax to you but expect bad hand writing and drawings (which can be helpful).

Use the information on the faxes you receive just like any other lead you get. Call the lead, build a relationship, and discuss their projects, their materials, and how you can help them. After your first contact, put the quote together and send it to them. Follow up as usual. Aside from a few industries, most companies are moving away from faxes and the rate of that migration is increasing but some of your visitors will appreciate the option and you might get a few orders might otherwise not have received without a fax lead option.

Put Your Domain EVERYWHERE

For many of you, the number one purpose of your website is to generate sales leads (or it was supposed to be). There are two main avenues for your leads to come to you from the website – phone and contact form. Other methods such asfax and email are important and useful but not as effective or controllable. Another method you might find very useful is an online real-time chat feature but it has its own unique set of problems. We will go over all the options throughout this blog.   

Visitor Preference
Different people prefer different methods of contacting you. There are people who would rather NOT be required to talk to anyone. Those people want send an email, get a response with answers or a quote, and might place an order right after that (you will probably have to talk to them on the phone at some point to discuss payment or delivery methods). Other people do not trust the internet and will never send any information to you via an online form. Those people will call you – great! Some people use the internet for searching but prefer the “old school” fax method of order fulfillment.

Offer Options
Being that your goal is to make money, you need to offer whatever options make contacting you as simple as possible so you can turn potential customers into current customers and your current customers into repeat customers. Give options and make them easy to use! Think of how Pizza Hut offers its products. Many Pizza Hut locations give you four ways to buy pizza from them. You can dine-in, use their convenient drive-through, order delivery via phone, or order delivery online! If you are in the market for pizza, you basically have no reason not to buy pizza because Pizza Hut has made it so simple.

Did you know Page Rank is a term named after Google’s Larry Page?

This is a cool paper about the beginning of Google. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html