Question

Topic: Branding

Selling Branding To Online Clients

Posted by Anonymous on 5/21/2013 at 6:22 AM ET 125 Points
I have a business directory, quite recent started 2012, yet have over 1,000 members, and over 500 have their company listed on the site. I want to start selling upgraded listings, yet I feel the benefit is more branding than direct sales for my members. How can I make my clients understand this and keep retention rates when they probably won't see immediate ROI's
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 5/21/2013 at 12:38 PM Accepted
    Create white papers proving the ROI of updated listing.
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 5/21/2013 at 5:35 PM Accepted
    Do these people understand what branding is, what it does, why it's important, and why it matters?

    Do they want to buy enhanced listings? What will those listings do for these people?
  • Posted on 5/22/2013 at 12:13 PM Author
    Hi KSA,
    Thanks for the reply, appreciate it. Traffic is around 7,000 visits a month which is not bad for a new ish site that is purely business in UK, they stay on an average 3 mins and the bounce rate is less than 80% I could show stats but I think its obvious we would not be getting Justin Beiber fans as its a business directory and business article marketing site. Each listing has their clicks clearly visiible for all to see, and premium upgraded listings always have more clicks. Nevetheless I can't say they will get a monetary ROI even if they get boosted clicks from the upgraded status. Yet the branding they receive will boost their google ranking and that is the challenge to sell on that basis, if they get an enquiry great, but who can promise that. A uograded listing is £20 a month the site is biz-find.co.uk by the way Thanks so much. Alan
  • Posted by Moriarty on 5/22/2013 at 12:38 PM Accepted
    Hi there, I just visited your site and there wasn't anything special there that I could see. Okay so I saw your Thailand directory and that was me gone - and the article "living in Thailand" caught my interest too. We first lived on the Cheroen Krung (near the railway station). This was the early 70s and there was no airco. I grew up sweaty!!

    To be frank, my impression of business directories is that they were supplanted by Google itself. Now for a new directory that's a pretty steep hill to climb. Okay, so twenty quid isn't that much - barely a shopping basket let alone a trolley. It's still an investment and in terms of Adwords clicks, significant. Mind you, one sale from that and most businesses would be interested. Is that the sort of thing you could guarantee?

    However, you are getting 7k clicks a month. That's pretty good. What's the click through rate - ie. are they finding the things they want? Are you generating traffic in any other way than purely organic SEO? Because to my mind, this is where you can get clever. You could offer an Adwords service as an aside, bringing clicks through your site and not necessarily directly to the business' site (that was tricky to spell with the dinner cooking!).

    Bear in mind that with paid advertising of this kind (PPC) you could begin to offer guaranteed ROIs because paid advertising is scaleable.

    On the other side, are businesses aware of the clicks that are coming from your site? I know of several business websites that don't even have the basic javascript analytics on board, let alone anything more powerful. They don't know how many visitors they have, leave alone sales or telephone calls. To my mind, if you started operating on the basis that you really *can* boost their incomes you would get real interest.
  • Posted on 6/1/2013 at 8:13 AM Author
    Hi KSA,
    Thanks so much for visiting the sites, yes aircon makes living here in Bangkok a lot better!
    Great and helpful comments thanks, things I will do are:
    Have an email that goes out to all members at 100 clicks to their listing, and each 50 after that to show they are getting interest.
    I will have a members offers page where members offer a discount to other members of the site
    I will create a buyers page where all the members of the site publish what they are looking for and grow membership this way.
    When the site hits 1,000 listings I will have a massive professional tele sales campaign (from A UK company I hasten to add) to ring all members to inform how to use the site effectively , how many clicks they had, and how to read their email contact forms. with this we will also try to upgrade then to the paid listings.
    Entrepreneurship says have a date! So this will all be done by year end 2013
    We also have ads on each category all described in the FAQ's
    I had an Adwords service as well as online press releases yet it was quite a struggle to get business online, I got a bit from physical networking in UK but I think to get sales online you have to get tough, and have all those horrible orange pop ups and 'buy now' arrows and 'don't go theres more' pop ups which personally I hate, and makes the site to hard sell and less of a directory with great articles. Yet I've been told that this approach eally works but I am loathed to go down that avenue and sell out at this stage.

    Cheers
    Alan
  • Posted by Moriarty on 6/3/2013 at 2:51 AM Member
    Good morning!

    Let's get down to business. How are you measuring your "clicks" to businesses? Is it Java-scripted or server-side (or using something like Owly or Bitly??). This isn't my strongest area, so allow me to get this wrong, okay? This does need clarification. I need to know whether people are finding the businesses they are looking for!


    I too hate all that faux pop-up stuff, orange, purple or pink. What you really need is something that teases the reader that gets them to click through or sign up to your inoffensive yet useful newsletter. Doing it this way is way more powerful and leads to far better quality.

    As to Adwords, this is a service you are using to get business - or help the businesses who are registered? If the latter, it could be part of a service that is much more expensive - yet worth their while. Filtered through your website means that you then keep all the email addresses. If the business wants to leave, they can arrange to purchase them. Adwords and related things are not easy to get right, especially the finer points of why someone buys from that company - such info makes advertising 10x more effective and 10x cheaper. They get the rewards, you get paid and your website gets even more traffic.
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