Do something good, do it often

If there’s something I learned in managing online marketing for small sized business, is that you have to be much better at producing sales than in a corporate environment.

This is not due to small business being greedier, or more demanding. Rather, they have a smaller reach with respect to a large corporation, and need constant cash flow to keep their business up and running.

While I could easily factor in a 6 to 12 months lead time for a vanity advertisement in corporate environments, small business wanted -and actually needed- results on a much tighter time frame, often as little as a month. And I’m not referring to lead generation, but to actual sales.

Do something good

This means you have to get it right on first try, and can not rely on the much abused concept of long tail. You can’t run an Adwords campaign expecting your customer to be happy for people that land on the page and bounce back in 00m:13s never to return. It does not matter at all that some of them, next year, when they are ready to buy, will remember the catchy logo as something familiar because they already visited the site, and therefore decide to buy from their long lost friend. It does not work this way.

Do it often

Given you have such a tight deadline for sales, you have to lure your prospects into calling, visiting, ordering. The first two are easy, the third is next to impossible. There’s no thing such as an instant sale for any high dollar product online. People shop around, compare, read opinions and try to choose something that makes sense to them. More often than not, they purchase on an emotional high, but this is never an immediate reaction, in my experience.

Do it the way that maximizes sales

So you have to grab them, and make them stay. Now, I know everybody says that you have to make life easy for your visitors, that you should have well designed sites where informations can be found easily. And this is true. But don’t be fooled: if people sees a price too high (and unless your client is underselling himself, the price for any quality product will appear high) they’ll close the page faster than light.

So make your site nice, clean, content rich and easily navigated. But require at least one click before the prospect sees the price. This is the rationale behind the long (spammy) sales pages that require you to scroll down, and down, just to get to the price. The longer the prospect stays on site, the higher the chances he or she will buy. In my experience (but again, for real products) prospect that are going to turn into clients will do at least a click to find out a price, as long as you reassure them the price is there, and have listed enough benefits to ignite their interest.

Tags: adwords for high dollar products, click here for the price, how to design a sales page, price too high, pricing online services, showing prices on pages, small business online marketing