Marin County digital marketing agency Inner Architect, celebrating its 10 year anniversary, has produced $190,000,000 in new revenue for their clients since Q3 of 2016. As a Google Marketing Partner agency certified in Google Ads, Inner Architect’s focus is on intake optimization aka the strategy of attracting prospective clients to your website, from multiple marketing channels, and converting those leads to new sales. If your firm communication strategies resemble a past era of communication (see image) then it might be time to review the checklist below.
Marin County Digital Marketing Agency Client Intake Optimization Service
What exactly is Inner Architect’s Client Intake Optimization Service?
Client intake optimization is the creation of a structure containing a set of processes designed to manage leads so that those leads will have a high probability of converting from lead status to new client. The critical make it or break it linchpin of this strategy is a rapid response to prospective client inquiries across multiple communication channels. Simply put, you must beat your competition to the punch. Without immediate action to contact a prospect, they will move on with their search. The response time must be in step with stringent guidelines of best practices in follow-up communications that will ensure consistent effective outreach each and every time an inquiry comes into your firm. This is a huge challenge for many firms. The primary challenge is the fact that most firms and companies do not have a response strategy in place.
No matter how fast your firm responds to inquiries, how effective your communication with prospective clients evolves, or how well your team is able to shepherd those prospects through the sales cycle, without the infrastructure to collect and measure data, your marketing program will flounder.
Marin County Digital Marketing Agency Marketing Fundamentals Checklist
Marketing is a science – specifically a data science. It is a science of measurement, testing, and housing of critical information. In order for your firm to optimize your intake processes, you must first establish the infrastructure pieces that will support your future marketing planning and actions. The following is a simple list of the pieces you must have to be successful in your efforts to generate new client revenue for your firm.
Google Analytics Reporting: Google Analytics reports website visitor actions and acts as a historical baseline which you can utilize in order to measure present and future marketing and advertising campaigns. Key reports include:
- Traffic volume and sources
- Page view activity
- Behavior flow through the website
- Mobile vs desktop traffic
- Organic search performance
- Time on-site
- Bounce rate
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): CRM tools are your historical database. It is here, in tools like Salesforce, Zoho, Nimble, your team will record data. This data originates from your sales activities and campaigns across multiple social networks and communication channels. Examples of the data being recorded in your CRM can include your team sales efforts in multiple channels, from your team response times as a metric, and from the feedback and results of those critical prospect conversations. These are just a snippet of the data points you should record.
SSL Certificate Encryption (secured website): Google’s demand to change from http encryption to https encryption for websites has arrived. Touted in 2017, the change must take place in order for your firm to stay in compliance with Google guidelines. Failure to upgrade to https encryption results in your firm’s website being penalized in Google search rankings and a warning icon being placed on your site warning potential visitors that your site is not a secure environment. You want to avoid these outcomes at all costs.
Website Speed – Google’s Page Speed Insights: if your website loads in more than 4-5 seconds, you are in danger of losing mobile users attempting to visit your site. Load times are the number one most critical aspect you must address before implementing any marketing program. For an evaluation and tips to improve site performance, you can refer to the Google Pagespeed Insights tool: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Mobile Friendly aka Mobile Responsive: although website load speed for mobile users arriving at your site is critical, the same emphasis must be placed on how your site appears once the visitor has arrived. Mobile-friendly or mobile responsiveness, as it is often called, is a must have for all firms today. In a non-mobile friendly environment the visitor arrives on a website that looks as if it is in miniature font, crammed into their phone screen, and nearly impossible to read. You can test your website performance on mobile devices here: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
Live Chat: one of the most critical communication channels to your conversion process, live chat gives your website visitors the opportunity to remain anonymous while making inquiries about your services. Your Live Chat box appears on all website pages and offers the visitor the opportunity to type questions to a live operator. This method of communication provides your firm the opportunity to communicate with visitors who would not choose to call you, who would not wish to fill out a time consuming contact form, prospects who would never consider calling your office, or interested parties who wouldn’t dream of sending your intake team an email. The live chat costs are incredibly economical and the best benefit is the fact that Live Chat functionality communicates to your prospects that your firm is up to date and progressive in comparison to many other firms. The goal of the live chat operator is to simply capture contact information and act as a liaison of contact between you and the potential client. There is no selling involved so the ethics restrictions placed on your industry do not come into play.
PPC – Google Ads: pay per click marketing (PPC) is an online auction where marketers create ads and bid on keywords to attract visitors to their website. The advantage of pay per click marketing is that you can experience results immediately. A pay-per-click program in Google Ads, or other ad platforms, allows your firm to compete for prospects in Google search quickly without the expense and lengthy time of a search engine optimization program.
Click Fraud Protection: click fraud, defined as a person or malicious bot clicking on your advertisement with the intent to illegally drain your advertising budget, will account globally for $50 billion in lost advertising dollars by 2025. Inner Architect’s click fraud protection service helps block malicious bot attacks that steal ad campaign budgets. Some of the activities we guard against include:
- Click Farms: defends against foreign based human Click Farms that intentionally click on your ads to drain your budget
- Scrapers: protects your expensive website content and copy by blocking scrapers who steal your website and blog content
- Duplicate content: helps prevent duplicate content penalties from Google by blocking content scrapers intent upon using your content for their own websites
- Malicious Bots: blocks robots (bots) that are programmed and deployed by your competition or nefarious organizations with the intent of wasting your ad budget
Content Development (Marketing): according to the Content Marketing Institute Content Marketing is defined as “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” Inner Architect specializes in Content Marketing through website page and blog writing best practices that adhere to SEO standards and user experience (UX) strategies. In addition, we craft social media content updates, utilize videos, and other interactive content in an effort to provide value for a client’s audience. The goal is to create website page content, blog content, and social media content that converts leads into sales.
Voice Engine Optimization (VEO): Voice Engine Optimization (VEO) is the next generation of search engine optimization tactics based on voice search. By 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice initiated replacing traditional keyboard typed search queries. What does this mean for every business that is competing for customers online?
The shift to voice search, according to SEO pundits, is a result of the change in user habits, the proliferation of smart speakers, and by Google whose goal in voice search is to provide the best most definitive answer to the user. The stark reality is this: Google will return one answer for each voice search query. Google wants to speed up the search process by reducing the need for users to vet through a number of search results and then click through in order to find their answers. In placing an emphasis on speed, Google may eventually make the SERPs (search engine results page) obsolete. The return to a Google user’s typed question currently elicits a page one with 10 links as well as Google Ads. In voice search, the user gets one answer with no option to read or review a page one SERP. Competition for consumer’s eyes and ears will be at an all time high!
We have outlined 10 critical strategies that every digital marketing agency should bring to the table when planning your marketing strategies. Do you have these pieces in place? If you do not or if you have questions on how all of this should fit together to support a common goal for your marketing program, please let us know by reaching out to Dean Guadagni or Susan Hanshaw via (415) 485.6961; dean@innerarchitect.com or susan@innerarchitect.com.
