Blog

Walibu- Marketing Expert Contributor

 Monday, July 11, 2016

Walibu- Marketing Expert Contributor

Is Your Marketing Effective?

Walibu is honored to be the Expert Contributor for EDH Neighbors Magazine, a monthly publication with great local articles, information and marketing reach for business owners. If you are a business owner in the greater El Dorado Hills area we highly recommend you contact them at- http://www.bestversionmedia.com/

For those of you who don't receive the magazine, Walibu's article is below, we'd love to help you out with any of your marketing needs.

As my first contributing marketing article, I thought it'd be a good idea to introduce myself and Walibu; a marketing company for all aspects and industries but with a focus on new media. I’ve always had a very high interest in marketing and its control on the world as well as technology and how fast it was taking over. Plus, I’ve always really liked the beach so Isla Vista and UCSB were a perfect match for my college choice (go Gauchos!). Following a communication degree from UCSB I set my sails towards the dotcom boom happening in the Bay Area and moved to Burlingame, CA.

While developing my own dotcom start-up I also started working at a dotcom in Foster City as a programmer and graphic designer as well as attended classes at Stanford University and UCSF with a computer science emphasis. Following the wave of overly funded launch parties and the boom’s bubble popping, I decided to head back to the beach and moved to Point Loma.

I became the webmaster for NBC San Diego, and assisted in the convergence of a modular web system to streamline sharing of news and information amongst all stations, a very fun and exciting position but I had higher hopes. With the interest in marketing, technology and the beach, Walibu - Marketing Paradise was created. New media marketing allowed marketing automation, a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week marketing system that worked regardless if you were on vacation or at the office.

So, with that being said, unless you've been living in a cave for the last 10 years you're well aware that your business needs to be on the internet, but "almost" more importantly it needs to be found. I say "almost" being that the last thing you want is to attract visitors and lose them or leave a bad taste, after the difficult part has been done.

And if you do generate a ‘lead’ from them are you nurturing that client/lead? With these issues as well as the recent mobile switch, search engines changing the way they index your site and technology as a whole changing as rapidly as it does, we thought we could lend a hand and make sure you are getting the most out of your web presence and automating your marketing efforts as much as possible but still keeping a personal touch.

Our approach is simple yet effective; Attract, Capture and Retain; which we will briefly outline (and elaborate in articles to come) and hopefully assist in enhancing your marketing efforts.

Attract- This is simple in theory yet very complex and involves many facets of marketing but to name a few; branding, SEO/web marketing, social media, face to face and print. All of the items need to convey a quick message about what you offer so they know if you have what they are searching for yet build trust at the same time.

Leading into Capture, a consumer’s average attention span is 8 seconds, 1 second less than a goldfish and dropping 4 seconds since 2000! That’s not much time to capture your visitor’s attention and make sure your visitor to client conversions are on the up and up. Trust carries over from the attract phase, however, you must also deliver appealing design, layout and usability to make sure your visitors aren’t scared off.

High quality photos and simplified messages seem to work well as overloaded information can overwhelm clients if not laid out correctly; look at the simplicity of Google’s home page, yet they offer an endless amount of resources. Now that we have them to your site, caught their attention, the capture needs to happen; make sure you have call to actions in place, easily available and not a challenge to find.

One technique we’ve found to have a high change in visitor to capture ratio is a form that leads with easy, non-invasive questions. Start with a drop down about the service, then maybe a radio or check box selection, then possibly an auto date selector, these get the form momentum started which leads to a higher completion rate once they get to the name, email, phone fields. Starting with these fields can seem too evasive and steer potential clients away.

The third, possibly the easiest, yet most ignored is the Retain phase. Nurturing current clients and prospect leads can do a tremendous amount of benefit to your business and unfortunately most businesses skimp or completely leave out this step. We recommend scheduled emails/newsletters, regular social posts of substance (there are several ways to go about this yet still drive site traffic) and even hand written letters depending on the type of business and/or clients you have.

As mentioned, we will develop these topics in more detail in future articles but this will hopefully give you a starting point on evaluating your marketing efforts. If you have any question about your marketing, branding, web design, social or even software development we’d love to hear from you!

Ben Paulsen
Walibu.com