Your SEM Program Worked. Now What?
By Karen Breen Vogel, CEO, ClearGauge
DMNews, December 25, 2006

Nearly everyone has seen this sight at one time or another: A car drives slowly down a tree-lined suburban street on a warm spring evening, while a few yards behind a dog runs furiously after it, barking wildly, as if on an important mission. It’s interesting when you think about it. All that noise and energy being expended, and yet the dog has no idea what he will do with the car if he actually manages to catch it.

Many marketers of “considered purchases” find themselves in the same dilemma. Because of the nature of the products and services they’re selling, and/or the cost, a visitor isn’t going to land on their home pages, read a few paragraphs, and plunk down a credit card as though buying a digital camera or an iPod.

Yet, that’s the way they spend their marketing dollars. The bulk of the budget is spent in activities such as search engine marketing that are designed to drive visitors to the site. But once they’re there, the organization fails to do anything to build the kind of relationship that engages prospects throughout the long sales cycle and helps them make a purchasing decision. That’s a serious mistake.

Despite what we were told back at the dawn of the Internet age, the Web didn’t quite change everything. Prospects that needed to think long and hard about a purchasing decision before there was an Internet still need to think long and hard about it now. Whether the key barrier to closing the sale is the cost of the product or service, the difficulty of making a change, fear of making a mistake, or some other factor, all the same rules apply.

The one thing that has changed is that buyers have a lot more power in the relationship than they used to, because everything you used to spoon feed them as part of the sales process is now sitting right out in the open. With a few clicks of a mouse, they can find product or service descriptions, specifications, schematics, customer case studies, and yes, even pricing. They come, they see, and they leave – unless you do something to engage them further.

Marketers need to recognize that their Web sites are more than information disseminators. They are tools that can be used to build relationships with their customers.

By taking the data generated by Web analytics applications and content/offer optimization tools, studying the data to discern visitors patterns and habits the way salespeople used to read body language and voice cues, and then adjusting your site accordingly, you can speed the sales cycle and improve your chances of securing more of those considered purchases.

Getting people to your site is only half the battle. Be sure you know what you want them to do – and what you want to do with them – after they’ve arrived. Otherwise, your SEM program will be a lot of barking with no bite.

Karen Breen Vogel is a highly regarded industry thought leader on the Internet’s impact on the future of marketing, and President/CEO of ClearGauge (www.cleargauge.com), an organization that helps companies with complex buying cycles leverage the Internet. Clients include Dow Chemical, DuPont, Emdeon, GE Corporate Financial Services, MOD-PAC, and Siemens. She can be reached at karenbv@cleargauge.com.