Usain Bolt won the 100m sprint at the last Olympics. Who came second?

Michael Phelps came first 8 times in the pool at the last Olympics. Do you remember 2nd and 3rd places in any of those races?

Now, who do you think is raking in all the sponsorship dollars and appearance fees? Bolt and Phelps or the guys they beat? Trust me, the bulk of the money (like 90%) is going straight to the winners while the lunch money is being shared amongst the rest.

Online search is exactly the same. First place wins BIG, the rest pick up the crumbs. It doesn’t matter how many different survey results you look at, the numbers are always similar:

Position 1 = 42.4% of clicks-through

Position 2 = 11.8%

Position 3 = 8.4%

Position 4 = 6.2%

Position 5 = 4.9%

Position 6 = 4.1%

Position 7 = 3.4%

Position 8 = 3.1

Position 9 = 2.7%

Position 10 = 2.9%

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Good web design is increasingly important for businesses trying to compete at a time when the Internet is the most consumed media in Australia. However, merely having a website isn’t enough these days. A good website is one that can be found easily in search, provides the visitor with relevant information and must has effective traffic conversion strategies in place.

So how much time have you spent thinking about the wording of your navigation? Or the location of a crucial button or link? You’d be amazed at the difference in results you can achieve with subtle changes.

We have been running Traffic Visualisation Analytics, such as heat-mapping, on several sites to monitor the results from changes to layout and wording. It has been a revelation. We have been able to see where people are clicking on the tested sites and where they came from. Then after making small changes we can compare results.

Heat mapping in action

On this particular site we found that visitors weren’t clicking through as much as we’d like to one of the most important pages in the navigation, “products”. So after a week of monitoring we changed the name of that page in the navigation to “services”.

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If there is one thing that sales team generally hate, its cold-calling. Finding new business prospects from scratch can be very difficult and disheartening.

Having run sales teams for a local radio station, I’ve seen good sales reps struggle with the dreaded cold-call. They leaf through the phone book looking for prospects then go through the process of hunting down the decision makers only to be told their services aren’t required.

Imagine if sales teams could forget about the cold-calling and just meet with qualified prospects. Imagine only meeting with buyers who’ve already decided they’re interested in what you’re selling.

That’s what Inbound Marketing can achieve.

Inbound Marketing positions a business in front of potential customers when they are read to purchase. It provides the purchaser with relevant information and an option to find out more, or make an inquiry with that business. Inbound Marketing brings highly qualified and motivated customers to you.

The results can be staggering. One sales force using our Sticky Inbound Marketing system is currently achieving a conversion rate of 92% from appointments to sales. Every one of those customers contacted them. Previously the same team was converting 27% of appointments to sales using old lead generation techniques.

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