Spring Cleaning Review for your Internet Marketing

By Todd Miechiels

After you clean out your closet, the garage, the car, the pantry, and the junk drawer in the kitchen, use this spring-cleaning season to eliminate the clutter that keeps website visitors from jumping into your pipeline after they reach your Home Sweet Homepage.

Here are some practical and easy suggestions that each of us can do to remove the dust and cobwebs from the 24-7 sales tool we lovingly refer to as our website. At the same time I'll offer a few tips to add some muscle and charm to your site so you can get bigger payoffs from all your sales and marketing efforts. This is just a starter list and I'd love for you to help add to it; make your suggestions on my blog at www.sowgro.com and I'll be happy to acknowledge your contribution.

#1 Step into Your Prospect's Shoes and Call Your Phone Number

Technically your phone system isn't part of your website but it definitely plays a big part in your Internet marketing process. So with fresh ears and an open mind, dial the number listed on your website.

Is the message or attendant friendly and knowledgeable?
Can you quickly and easily get to a sales person or do you get routed around?
Would you truly be inclined to explore a business relationship based on the phone experience?

A simple tool like www.telecapture.com lets you track, record, listen back, and distribute all inbound calls from your website. I highly recommend that every company use a service like this to learn and improve in this area.

Action Item: Go through the phone experience and document what you think could be done better, and then bring it up at your next sales and marketing meeting.

#2 Review, Test, and Reconsider Your Contact Form

Experience the contact form as your prospect would.

Is it easy to find from all pages? Could it be even easier to find?
Is the information being asked really necessary or can it be trimmed down? The idea here it to start a dialog and relationship, not put them through an inquisition.
Is the form confusing? Does it clearly indicate which fields are required?
Upon completing the contact form are you taken to a professional, branded 'thank you' page? Do you offer any 'next steps' on this page such as a featured paper, demo request, references and testimonials? It doesn't have to be just a thank you message.
Do you automatically and immediately receive a professional and engaging message from a sales representative?
Have you confirmed who receives the form, who responds to the form and in what time frame?

Action Item: Go through the contact form experience and document what you think could be done better and bring it up at your next sales and marketing meeting.

#3 Review the Home Page

When looking at your home page, what would your prospect find when they ask:

What's in it for me? How am I better off after having used your product or service? Are these points clear and obvious at a quick glance?
What's with all the other junk and clutter on the home page?
What do you want me to do from here? Is it clear and obvious?

Action Item: Review the home page and document things that should be demoted or removed and things that should be added or emphasized. Use the question, "Will this element help or hurt the visitor's chances of converting to a specific goal?"

#4 Review Your Email Signatures

Are all of your email signatures consistent?
Do they have hyperlinks to your website? Are you using tracking parameters in your hyperlinks?
Do they promote an offer or campaign that you are running? (free whitepaper for instance, or your blog).

#5 Test for Broken, Outdated Links

Use http://validator.w3.org/checklink to check your website for broken links.

#6 Press Releases

When was the last time you put a press release out?
Was it optimized for the search engines?
Are you measuring traffic and conversion from your press releases?

#7 Your Search Engine Presence

Declare the one or two search phrases that if nothing else your company should be appearing on the search engines for.

Are you showing up in Google at the top?
If not, have you employed some basic best practice search optimization?
Have you considered and tried paid search advertising to determine if you can profitably generate business or opportunities?

#8 LinkedIn, Facebook, and Other Social Networking Profiles

Go ahead and update (or create) your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles for all of your customer-facing employees.
Make sure everyone is being consistent in their company messaging as well as plugging the website, blog, killer whitepaper, etc.
Examine your "Rolodex" and see who you still haven't connected with.
Identify those people in your network (and those connected to them) and develop a plan to reach out and provide value, make introductions, etc.

Obviously this just a small list of things you can do with some of your "spare time" ; ) this spring. Do you have other ideas that would help companies "spring clean" their website and improve their lead generation? Post comments on my blog at www.sowgro.com.