Search Engine Marketing – The importance of the “easy sale”

In our previous post, we discussed the concept of the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) two-step, and ended by introducing the concept of the “easy sale”.

What’s the easy sale? That’s the offer on your Website that allows your prospect to sign up for an e-newsletter / request a whitepaper / complete a scorecard – anything that allows them to learn more about your company without the risk of having to speak to a live human being – or worse – the dreaded “Sales Representative”. In return, you capture their contact info (email address minimum) which now allows you to continue marketing to this prospect on an ongoing basis and puts you in control of the sales cycle.

For products or services that are fairly complex or sophisticated (quite common in B2B), the easy sale is key. People don’t buy what you sell on first contact. Rather, it’s the beginning of a communications and sales cycle that could last weeks or months. But if you don’t get their contact info when they visit your site, the conversation is usually over forever the moment they click away from your site.

For simpler products and services (think B2C), the concept of the easy sales still applies. It just happens to be the same as the REAL sale. But your Website still needs to make the visitor’s purchase of your product or service, easy, intuitive, low risk and pain free.

At this time, Search Engine Marketing is probably the single best marketing investment most SMBs can make. It’s relatively low cost, delivers a high ROI, and is easy to measure.

So to summarize:

Step #1: Use Search Engine Marketing to get found by those looking for what you sell.

Step #2: Use the easy sale to convert visitors into identified prospects.

In future posts we’ll look at the components of Search Engine Marketing in more detail, and discuss the Do’s and Don’ts of effective Search Engine Marketing for SMBs.