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There’s nothing more disheartening than seeing visitors flooding into your site thanks to some good campaigns . . . But then not sticking around.

This is the frustration Bret Hoyt Sr., president of contract manufacturer Vitakem Nutraceuticals, was experiencing.

“Our website wasn’t working for us,” recalls Hoyt. “We had visitors coming in but very few were contacting our sales team.”

Hoyt approached me to see how we could turn this around.

Identifying The Problem(s)

Since the best solutions are built on a clear understanding of the problem, we started with a website content audit.

First, through an initial interview, I ferreted out the goals for the website, Vitakem’s USP and the competitive environment. Then, by examining the website data and assessing the website’s content I gathered clues that helped paint a picture of why website visitors were skipping away at the drop of a hat.

Here’s what I discovered:

The initial copy had been well optimized for search engines. But the human visitors had been largely ignored. In fact some of the website copy was downright unintelligible.

Adding Glue To The Webpages

Drawing on my knowledge of the nutrition industry and interviews with Vitakem’s sales team, we honed in on the pressing issues most prospective customers care about. I replaced the website’s existing copy with copy that was written for these potential customers while maintaining optimization for search engines.

As a result, the site’s overall bounce rate dropped from 57% down to 40%, with some individual pages dropping from bounce rates into the mid 80′s to bounce rates in the 20′s and 30′s. These numbers told us that less people were  “bouncing” off the pages (leaving soon after they’ve arrived).

Lead Generation Tactics

Now that visitors were sticking around more, we wanted to take them to the next step – initiating contact. The only invitation offered to visitors to contact the sales team was a Request-A-Quote link or a bland Contact Us option.

The site offered no opt-in incentive to visitors who were not ready to get a quote. Even worse, by making a quote request the sole contact option, it framed the whole sales discussion around pricing.

To change the focus of the conversation, we created a white paper, “6 Questions You Should Ask When Choosing Your Nutritional Supplement Manufacturer”. This paper positioned Vitakem not only as a service provider, but also as a helpful partner in making the crucial decision of choosing a contract manufacturer. And it took price away from the center of the initial conversation.

To gain more traffic, the report was also repurposed into several SEO articles that were used for two purposes: 1.) To bring in traffic through SEO and article marketing; and 2) as part of a survey and 3-part email series sent out to lapsed leads bringing them back to the sales team.

Following on the heels of the report download came a carefully-crafted 11-part autoresponder series. This series highlighted the report’s tactical information. It also prodded prospective customer pain points, reminding them of how Vitakem could help them. Each autoresponder’s call to action encouraged the prospect to call the sales team.

Finally, as an added push to encourage even more visitors to get in touch with the sales team, we created a 2-minute video. The video welcomed visitors to the home page and directed them to the report offering.

A Website That Helps Grow Business

Vitakem’s CEO and President, Bret Hoyt, Sr. couldn’t be more pleased with the results, “Since implementing the marketing funnel Sarah created, we’ve had a 20% increase in leads,” Hoyt reports. “But even more importantly, these leads are already pre-sold on our services helping us with our lead conversion.”

By finely tuning the messaging on the website, the report and the autoresponders to tap into prospective customers’ most pressing problems we made Vitakem an option visitors couldn’t ignore. The website and the report spoke to their questions, doubts and interests. And as a result, more visitors contacted the sales team and more of these leads were predisposed to like what they heard as the process continued.

Concludes Hoyt, “Overall, investing in Sarah’s expertise and keen understanding of the nutrition industry has been invaluable for my business.”

For more information on how a lead-generation strategy like this could help your B2B nutrition industry website, be sure and get this meaty report:

“How To Turn Your Website and White Paper Into A Recession-Busting Dynamic Duo”

Or email me at Sarah @ HealthyMarketingIdeas.com to schedule an appointment to discuss your marketing concerns

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I love potatoes.

And one of the delightful surprises each year in my garden is the discovery of potatoes I didn’t plant.  See, each year there are a few spuds that didn’t make it into the harvest buckets. They sit in the earth all winter. And when spring arrives, they push through the softened soil to volunteer their tasty tubers.

This year I found Yukon Gold potatoes in my squash bed, Banana Fingerlings tucked in among my garlic and some beautiful large Kennebec’s thriving in the compost pile.

Websites harbor the same delightful surprises. Real solid mashed-potato meals for your business. Pure Yukon Gold. But too many businesses don’t look for them . . . don’t find them . . . Or don’t know what to do with them once they do find them.

As a natural health SEO copywriter, I find them all the time for my clients and help them put these untapped resources to good use.

Here’s what I mean.

The 3 Secret Treasures In Your Website You Don’t Know About

1.    The High-Traffic Page Lost In the Archives

Just this summer I did a website content audit for a client. And lo and behold, when I looked through his analytics I found one page was getting thousands of hits each month. It was an article about fungal infections, one of this business’ specialties.

Despite the popularity of this page with his visitors, my client had forgotten that it existed. In fact, he couldn’t even find it using his website’s navigation.

Clearly he had a great landing page that was pulling in traffic. However, when I looked more closely, most of the visitors were leaving the page and his website after a short perusal of the page.

I realized based on the search terms it was ranking for that many of his visitors needed a little more confirmation that they had come to the right place for their search. We needed to tailor the content a little more, add a sidebar and make sure these new visitors stuck around a bit more.

And then we needed to artfully move them deeper into his website towards his sales pages.

His website is not alone. Most websites have terrific content that’s pulling in traffic but not being used effectively to convert that traffic into customers – or at least hot leads.

2.    High ranking pages that aren’t converting to clicks

It was exciting to find this page bringing in all these visitors each month. But soon my excitement reached a fevered pitch when I looked even more closely at the data.

It was ranking #1, #2 and #12 for some very high-volume search terms. Using some raw estimations, if this page was ranking like this it should be pulling in close to 40,000 visitors each month.

It wasn’t.

So I looked at the search engine results page (SERP) for the different terms. This is the results page people see after they put in a search term with Google. It is the page that lists the different options Google has come up with.

His pages were up there, ranking well. But the title and description that appeared in the list of options Google brought up did nothing to intrigue searchers. I could tell right away that he was losing potential visitors right from the start, despite its stellar rankings. The people who had searched for one of the terms that brought up his page just weren’t being drawn to click on his website listing.

See, plenty of SEO’s do some meat market page title that just lists a few key words. Like “fungus| fungal infections| natural antifungals”.

Ho hum. If I’m looking for some help, I’m more likely to go for a title that says something like, “Got Fungus? Best Natural Antifungals For Fungal Infections”.

And then under the title I’d create an equally intriguing description that ends with a call to action, encouraging searchers to click through to his website.

Maybe something like, “Got that sneaking suspicion you’re battling a fungal infection? Use natural antifungals to beat fungus safely. Find out more . . .”

These two bits of copy, called metatags, are often overlooked by webmasters, put in as an insignificant afterthought. Some SEO’s belittle meta-descriptions as not such a big factor in ranking.

I beg to differ. When it comes to SEO, every bit helps in telling search engines the goods are on this page. And when it comes to searchers, if you can’t grab their attention and encourage them to come to your site on the search engine results page, why bother ranking?!

3.    Hidden High Attraction Search Terms You’re Already Pulling With

This is a lesson I discovered on my own HealthyMarketingIdeas.com website.  When I looked through my website analytics, I found out that many of my visitors were not potential health copywriting clients, but beginning health copywriters looking for information!

I found I was ranking well for terms related to health copywriting courses and resources.

Hmm. I’ve written an e-book on writing copy for nutritional supplements. And I’m an affiliate marketer for many tremendous health copywriting resources. I realized that if I publicized the same products I used to keep my business humming, I could get a nice affiliate commission as a result.

If I don’t create some pathways for this traffic to purchase things from my website, I’m missing out!

Not to mention I’m doing a disservice to these visitors who may be looking for recommendations to get their business going.

Based on this discovery, I’ve slowly been retuning my website to help these visitors out. And making some income from it on the side.

Tap Into Your Natural Health Website’s Hidden Treasure Chest

Your website could be loaded with gold, just hidden beneath the surface. However, you won’t know it if you don’t look for it.

This is why the data you collect on your website traffic is so important. It can help you recalibrate your marketing to capture potential customers you’ve been ignoring.

And then you can get to work . . . mining that treasure and growing your business. Sometimes it takes just a few tweaks. Often enough, this sleuthing can reveal the direction for a whole new profitable marketing campaign.

I offer a site content audit to help marketers ferret out this gold and create a strategy for making it shine. If you’d like to have me do some detective work on your site, contact me at sarah @ healthymarketingideas.com. (Just take out the spaces  – they’re there to keep spammers at bay.)

For a more in depth look at how to make your website work harder for you,  be sure and check out my report written just for health marketers, “5 Internet Marketing Mistakes . . . And How To Fix Them For Online Success.”

If you’re a B2B business you might be interested in the B2B version, “Turn Your Website And White Papers Into A Recession-Busting Dynamic Duo.”

Be sure and sign up for one of these maps of what your website should be doing.  And then let’s get treasure-hunting . . .

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Diversify Or Die: A Dire Multichannel Marketing Lesson From The Farm

November 16, 2011
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Last year whenever we looked at our beautiful plum tree, we tasted bitterness – not the sweet taste of plums we had hoped for . . . A late spring frost had taken out most of our crop. Thousands of promising little orbs that we had been celebrating in May just blackened and fell off. [...]

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How Replacing One Button In Your B2B Website’s Home Page Can Make You A Superhero To Your Prospective Clients And Make Price Less Important To Them

November 9, 2011
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The majority of B2B websites in the nutrition industry make a deal-killing mistake right on their home page. It’s rampant. And it’s deadly. It squashes leads. And it can rob your outstanding business of its distinction, tossing you and your sales team back into the morass of websites and businesses vying for your prospect’s attention. [...]

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Building Trust In Marketing By Watching Your Bacon Breath

October 17, 2011
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As you may already know, we raise pigs.  And, just to warn anyone who is a little uncomfortable about the reality of meat – we raise them to eat them.  This article refers to this hard fact of my life. See for first the 6 months or so on our farm, our pigs enjoy days [...]

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Aweber’s Stellar Autoresponder Service

September 22, 2011
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If there is one powerful piece of copy I advise all my clients to use, it’s the autoresponder. You can read all about why I like it right here: Follow Up Autoresponders: A Natural Health Marketer’s Cure For A Forgetful And Tightfisted Market And if you want to implement an autoresponder series with finesse, there [...]

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Follow Up Autoresponders: A Natural Health Marketer’s Tool For A Forgetful And Tightfisted Market

September 21, 2011
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I’ve been trying to get my kids to put their dishes in the dishwasher. Like most things I try to establish here, it took a few months of me calling out, “A., come get your bowl.” Or “O., is this your plate on the table?” Too often I’d just pick up the stray dishes myself, [...]

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Niche Marketing: How To Find Your Natural Health Fan Club

September 8, 2011
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Crazy costumes.  Green body paint on shaved heads.  Wild cheering, waves and mascots. If you looked around the stadium you could have sworn you were at some sporting event. But this high energy, fan fever was not generated by people throwing balls. This frenzy was generated by ball-throwing robots. And not even good ball-throwing robots [...]

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Don’t Let Yippy Dogs Do This To Your Customers

April 3, 2011
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I observed the funniest thing the other day.  We were just leaving our neighbor’s house after dropping off some maple syrup and eggs.  As we pulled out of the driveway and turned onto the road . . . Whoa! A 1-ton bull was heading right towards the truck. One of her herd was loose.  It [...]

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Goats And Selling In This Economy

January 11, 2011
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The two goats we have in our barn are a goat farmer’s dream come true because . . . §    They’ll eat anything – they munch on grass, hay, brussel sprout stalks and pricker bushes with gusto. §    They’re pretty quiet.  Occasionally one will let out a plaintive maa if one of us steps within [...]

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