JDR Group's 'Digital Prosperity' Blog

The reason you have a website is to get people to visit it and engage with it. Whether your website is eCommerce and you're looking for sales, a brochure site that shows off your great products and services, or an information site you hope will educate people, you have that website because you want people to visit it.

As a business owner, you want to make money. To make money, your business needs to makes sales. To make sales, your business needs to promote its products or services. It’s simple, right? You can just tell people how great your business is and how amazing your products or how spectacular your services are. You can even try to entice your target audience more with special offers.

Many businesses rely on consumer data to reach new audiences, using a generic marketing approach in the hope of making a few meaningful connections. While this strategy may have yielded results in the past, today’s consumers are continually bombarded by marketing messages; whether in-store, online or via the media. With so many channels vying for attention, it’s easy for your message to get missed, filtered or blocked. Over 37% of internet users already use ad blockers, so the content you display in other areas must attract and engage with your customers. Unless your marketing activities are highly focussed to reach and connect with a predetermined target audience, you could be wasting time and resources, as well as destroying the value within your data.

Social media can be something of a revelation to businesses who spent years spending a fortune on traditional advertising while bringing only limited results. The feeling you get when the first leads start coming in from your first Facebook advert, seeing your ‘like’ counter growing day by day, realising that this stuff really works - is simply priceless. In retrospect it is easy for businesses to see why so many companies use social media, and many kick themselves for not getting on the bandwagon years ago.

Social media marketing is affordable, fun, scalable and delivers results. No wonder so many businesses set up new accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram every day.

A lot of successful businesses would describe marketing automation as a huge factor in their success. In fact, many of the top performing small to medium-sized businesses are likely to utilise marketing automation in some way. However, the majority of small to medium-sized businesses don’t use marketing automation. This can be for a number of reasons including:

Search engines are fantastic at matching search queries with informative, helpful content. That’s not so great if your business website performs more like a digital sales brochure than an information hub. If your website fails to provide a relevant answer to a search query you’ll miss out on organic search traffic.

Inbound marketing can help any business whatever the industry. Inbound marketing is all about getting people to visit your website, whether this is because they trust the advice you give, enjoy your content, or they have been referred to you. It doesn't matter what you want to use your website for. If you're using inbound marketing, your website is going to get desirable visitors.

So let's take an eCommerce website as an example. How does inbound marketing specifically help an eCommerce site get leads to make a purchase? Well, here is 6 reasons just to get you started.

The aim of a lead generation website is to convert visitors into hot prospects, but this can only be achieved if you are attracting the visitors who could genuinely benefit from your brand. Your website should be your most valuable lead generation tool, acting as an information hub for your target audience, building trust in your business and compelling interested prospects to get in touch. As inbound leads typically cost 80% less to convert, turning your website into a lead generation machine is a worthwhile investment.

Regardless of what industry you are in, a CRM system is exactly what your company needs.

What Is A CRM System?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management with the aim to help grow and organise anything from a local company with a few employees, to corporate international enterprises. CRM Systems can manage a large amount of data all on one platform, enabling businesses to reach their full potential. They provide an insight into sales activities and account history, with highly useful and recommended reporting and tracking functions.

Website optimisation (sometimes referred to conversion rate optimisation - CRO) is the process of systemically improving the overall performance and functionality of your website. Every visitor comes to your website hoping to find the answer to a question, find a solution to their problem, or complete a task. Optimising your website makes it easier for visitors to complete these tasks without any hiccups - therefore increasing the likelihood of that person repeatedly investing in your business.