The greatest risk to any business is that no customers will show up, the issue is the mentality that customers are going to drop out of the sky just because you’re so cool.

Maybe marketing feels weird. Maybe selling feels impossible. (Trust me, I have been there.) Maybe you’re making excuses for not pushing out of your comfort zone, by telling yourself that great products don’t need to be marketed and sold — they just sell themselves.

Great products and services deserve great marketing, so they’ll find the audiences they can help. Your brilliant business idea is only as good as your ability to sell it.

Gone are the days (if they ever existed) where you only had to build a web site and people would come. The truth is that if you build it, they won’t come and if they do come, you’ve got only seconds to capture their attention.

Good well-crafted short Videos and great copy are proven ways to keep your visitors on your site for long enough to discover your ‘greatness’ or fantastic products. The look and feel of your web site comes second.

Look at AlbertaInsuranceExam.com, it has a look that only a mother could love. However, statistics are showing something very interesting and the sales are proving it is working.

Typically, on this web site, 40% of visitors drop off within their first 15 seconds on the site. However, of the remaining 60% more than 35% will subscribe to the free courses or newsletter and a whooping 50% will buy one of the 2 exam prep courses offered. These numbers (15% conversion rate) have kept steady for the last 9-10 months…

How is this being done? Well, I think first my target audience is clearly identified in the SEO and the first few words on the site on all pages. If that’s what you are searching for on Google, you’ll find it multiple times on the first page of Google for each relevant keyword or search phrases. If you are NOT looking to write and pass the Insurance Agent/Broker licensing exam, there is not much on this site for you.  So, I don’t want to waste the visitors’ time and I am sure they appreciate it too.

For the visitors interested in these exam courses, I quickly go over the what, how, who, why and when of the courses and gives them an opportunity to get started right away.

This scenario is repeating itself over and over on many web sites, mine as well as others on the internet.

One of the biggest problem I see on web sites is too much focus on the look and feel and not enough on the content.

Remember, sell people want they want (SEO & salescopy) and give them what they need (content & value).

Hey, don’t take my word for it, try it for yourself and reap the rewards.

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Marketing starts with asking why

Simon Sinek articulates in this short video and his book Start With Why how it is that some companies are able to better connect with their deeper reason – forbeing, with the result being a deeper resonance in the marketplace.

Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers — and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling.

About Simon Sinek

In 2009, Simon Sinek released the book “Start With Why” — a synopsis of the theory he has begun using to teach others how to become effective leaders and inspire change.

We’ve all heard of the dismal state for reading literacy of the students coming out of our school system and I do not need to add to it in this post. What interest me here is how to I develop a product, a marketing plan or a course to target today’s audience that clearly does not like to read.

Here are some recent stats from the US Census, and I am sure the stats in Canada and the UK are not much more encouraging.

So, does it not make sense to explore different media to target your audience? Over the last year, I had the opportunity to develop a few online courses, and most of them delivered via online video lessons. The feedback and the actual test results from our students are outstanding. Adults like the options to be able to pause, rewind and play back videos at their leisure. They tell us that they also like to be able to even play the video on a larger screen, as it makes them feel more like sitting in a classroom.

On the marketing side, we’ve also started to use short videos on client’s web site with great results. It looks like Google also likes video a lot. Our tests showed that pages with a video posted on it, with a great title and a short paragraph to introduce the topic or product and service showed on the video, ranked people than the similar topic or subject page with a 800-100 words article.

Go figure, people really don’t like reading that much any more. So, don’t quit writing great content but do add a short video – it will pay off.

PS: I’ll start making video posts, or at least make the post available as audio soon.

Alain

Here is a great presentation by Blue Mango Learning Systems to help you understand and choose between video, screen captures (screensteps) or tutorials to get maximum impact or results.

At e-Possibilites, we can create your marketing videos, training tutorials as well as detailed user guides.

This video is about 23 minutes long but would give you great understanding of the options you have. Do let me know what you think or contact me if you would like me to do a free consultation on how I could help you and your organization reach more people with video marketing, convert more visitors into customers with screen casts or turn your customers into evangelist for your business with great custom product implementation tutorials.

“For the first time, marketers spent more in 2009 on Internet advertising than in magazines, according to a report from ZenithOptimedia, which said online ad spending would rapidly close ground on newspapers.”

(Source: NY Times, 4/26/10)

Alain