October 2009

Need to create and test landing pages quickly and easily?

Meet Unbounce.com. Unbounce is a new Vancouver startup company that’s aiming to make your life as a marketer much, much easier when it comes to setting up, tracking and testing landing pages.

If you’re new to the conversion optimization game, landing pages are pages on a site that are setup to provide a visitor with whatever it is they are specifically searching for. This is their primary purpose in regards to the visitor. For example, if I do a search for “garden hose”, and I click on a Google Adwords ad in the Google search results, I should be taken to a page that talks about garden hoses, not the company’s home page – the landing page is the specific page on the website that addresses the need I was hoping to fill.

From a marketers perspective, landing pages are also used to encourage a visitor to take an action like complete a form to contact a sales person, download a white paper, or make a purchase online. What ever the action ends up being, it should be the next step in your sales process. For example, a poor use of a landing page would be to link out to another website thereby sending a visitor away from your site. Instead, you might offer them some free information that they could exchange their email address for. In this way you’ve gained permission to send them something and can follow up with them.

If you’re using pay-per-click marketing (for example Google Adwords) as part of your online marketing strategy, you’ll also want to create specific landing pages to match each Ad Group you’ve setup in order to insure that each visitor who clicks on one of your ads is taken to a page that is relevant to the search term they typed in and the ad they clicked on.

The ideal landing page will accomplish all of these results:

• It will, first and foremost, satisfy the need that the visitor had in mind when they started their search
• It will contain content highly relevant and enticing to the user and will use a call to action to get them to do something that results in them taking the next step in the sales process with you.
• It will focus on and use the keywords that the user typed into a search engine to find you

So how do you create the ideal landing page?

That is exactly the question that Unbounce is seeking to answer. In a nutshell the company is working on a hosted solution that will enable marketers to quickly and easily setup, launch and test landing pages without having to get mired down in HTML files, code, and FTP software.

The company is getting very close to launching its flagship product and I had a chance to sit down with Rick Perreault from Unbounce to talk a little shop and find out what Unbounce’s plans are for the immediate future.

From what I learned I am very intrigued to try out the product once it goes live. Here’s a quick clip from Rick. I kinda dropped the whole video interview on him out of the blue so this is a quick clip. It’s become a habit of mine lately to ambush people during meetings with my Flip Mino HD and Rick was up to the challenge.

At the end of this week, we’ve decided to setup another meeting. I’ll be heading over to the Unbounce offices for some beer with my Flip Mino in hand. Will keep you posted on what I learn.

In the mean time, I came across this video by Tim Ash on landing page optimization. It’s a bit lengthy at 1:15 but there are sure to be some nuggets you can take to the bank within.

Tweet This Post  Plurk This Post  Buzz This Post  Delicious This Post  Digg This Post  Ping This Post  Reddit This Post  Stumble This Post 

Legendary Sales trainer Jeffrey Gitomer spoke this morning at The Art of Sales event in Vancouver.

I made it to the morning session and got to see Jeffrey Gitomer speak on sales and marketing. After his talk, I had a chance to meet him and shot a quick video. Check it out (my notes on the seminar are below, there is also another video direct from Jeffrey Gitomer at the end of this post):

How to Dominate Your Market

*Disclaimer: I took these notes on my blackberry in point form so you’re getting it in raw format without witty commentary!

Now that I’ve given you fair warning, here are some great lessons from the sales and marketing master himself:

1. Give something away to your customers – give them more than they paid for
2. What have you done that’s promo worthy?
3. Desire to be the best at whatever it is that you do.
4. Gitomer spoke on the importance of scheduling time to think. Think about your business, think about being the best, think about how you can do a better job for your customers etc. Thinking is crucial, it’s fundamental to the success of your business.
5. Come to sales meeting prepared with questions and ideas for your customer or prospective customer. Quit barfing out your corporate speak and corporate brochure on them at your first meeting (or any meeting).
6. Use music to get into a great place mentally before meetings.
7. Self confidence comes from belief in your self and preparation.
8. Develop a sales mission statement for your company.
9. Gitomer spoke about the importance of attracting customers and positioning. Competition sucks! Position yourself as the best in your industry/niche/category and communicate with customers once a week at least via email in addition to other means like facebook, twitter etc. Prospecting is stupid. Attracting business by taking advantage of the web is key. Work on your site daily. Attracting customers and staying in touch with them are the most important things you can do, the most challenging things you can do AND they are the same thing!
10. Want more sales? Make it easy on yourself and SELL MORE TO YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS!
11. Keep customers loyal by getting personal with them or someone else will and you’ll be out of luck.
12. Gitomer used the example of how Harley Davidson has the most loyal customers in the U.S – they tattoo Harley on themselves!! Do you customers do that?

HOW TO DOMINATE YOUR MARKET? –> PROVIDE THE BEST SERVICE. PERIOD!

Help customers sell more of their stuff. Go work at a customers business for a day. Add a customer philosophy of how you treat your customers to your website.

At Gitomer’s office, their unofficial mission is: Sell Jeffrey and Kiss Ass!

Practical Things You Can Do:

• Start and ezine and a blog
• Read What Would Google Do.
• Get on Facebook
• Get on Twitter (a large chunk of the audience did not use Twitter or Facebook surprisingly)
• Get a Flip Mino HD and use it to create content
• Double the number of testimonials you get – get them on Video!

You need:

• A great attitude
• To love your product
• Preparation
• Self confidence

Additional Points:

• Word of mouth determines your fate.
• Focus on the quality of the relationship with your customers.
• Make your relationships with them interpersonal
• The way you dedicate yourself to the way you think is your attitude. You have to believe the customer is better off being served by you, otherwise you should quit right now!
• You master establishing common ground and rapport when you laugh lots with customers. TIP: YOU ARE NOT LAUGHING WITH THEM ENOUGH RIGHT NOW!!!
• Watch The Family Guy for tips on humor
• Brainstorm ideas with customers on how to help them sell more
• What are you doing beyond sales? (in regards to helping your customers win?)
• Find out something personal about them and do something memorable with them (Example of the hotel who gave him a baseball where all the staff had signed it because he is a ball fan.)
• Be memorable
• Be friendly
• Give value first
• Train and educate yourself to be the best, then go out and do the same with your staff: teach them how to be the best
• Always answer in terms of what you can do, not what you can’t do for a customer
• Be the best
• Think of being the best
• Have a yes! attitude
• Work on your attitude for 15 minutes a day 1st thing in the morning
• Buy Gitomer’s books so he can put his kids through college

The end result of attending this morning? Well I sat down and wrote this post which I will also be sending out to my subscriber list. I also bought Jeffrey’s book, The Little Teal Book of Trust (see image at the beginning). The talk also inspired me to find more ways to get to know and serve my current customers. By doing so I know I’ll attract more business which is really what marketing is all about. Attraction and service.

To finish off this post, here’s a great video from Jeffrey on developing a positive mental attitude for those of you who stuck around to read this from start to finish:

Thoughts? Did you like this? Let me know in the comments section.

Tweet This Post  Plurk This Post  Buzz This Post  Delicious This Post  Digg This Post  Ping This Post  Reddit This Post  Stumble This Post 

Last week I had the opportunity to meet with Monica Priebe of BBN3, a Vancouver based video marketing and production company. Monica is the Business Development Manager for SoMedia Networks which owns BBN3.

The reason we met was to discuss BBN3’s  latest offering: professional video production services for businesses.

The idea is to give companies the ability to have video professionally produced at accessible rates. Basically they are aiming to make high quality, professional video production available to businesses at a fraction of the traditional cost by tapping into their nation wide network of video journalists and producers.

Monica had this to say about BBN3’s production capabilities:

“Our production team are experts, having produced 3 television series nationally syndicated in the US in 77% of households, sourcing Video Journalists for our city-by-city news network, BBN3, and having produced corporate video for clients, like Electronic Arts.”

The following is a quick clip from our meeting:

The service sounds pretty cool and I can see it being very useful for companies who are looking to be found by potential customers via services like Youtube.  I especially like the fact that they have a ton of production experience and the ability to tap into a network of experienced producers and video journalists to create and produce high quality video at a reasonable cost.

One of the things we talked about was that video, despite it’s huge uptake in recent years, still remains inaccessible to the majority of businesses. BBN3 is aiming to address this need.

As more and more people consume content via video, whether on the web or via mobile devices, it is becoming more and more important for businesses to use video as a marketing medium. I think the creation of a service like this will help bridge the gap between the apparent need and lack of ability in the marketplace.

Tweet This Post  Plurk This Post  Buzz This Post  Delicious This Post  Digg This Post  Ping This Post  Reddit This Post  Stumble This Post 

Foursquare.com, a new social media / social networking site that is part game, part friend tracker, part review service hit Canada like a storm a couple of weeks ago when they launched in Vancouver.

Since the service launched “more than 3,000 venues and 1,500 users” have been added in Vancouver.

Yesterday I was interviewed by Gillian Shaw of the Vancouver Sun and was quoted in an article about Foursquare that was published today.

Here’s the quote:

Vancouver Web marketing consultant Adam Killam doesn’t mind sharing his whereabouts with friends on his social network. When he tweeted his intention to meet a friend at Earl’s in Yaletown and checked in with Foursquare when he got there, the manager sent free beer to their table.

“Especially being in the technology community, we all hang out in the same places and we want to meet. If you have a secret meeting in a shady part of town you may not want to share it,” he said, laughing.

See the full story in the Vancouver Sun.

Tweet This Post  Plurk This Post  Buzz This Post  Delicious This Post  Digg This Post  Ping This Post  Reddit This Post  Stumble This Post