If you haven’t heard of John Dwyer (JD) you may be familiar with the advertising work he has done, most notably the ‘get a free holiday with your home loan from the greater’ and the quirky Jerry Seinfeld ads promoting the Greater Building Society which were designed to carve out a profitable customer segment from the big banks in Australia. The ads seemed a bit odd/gimmicky to me at the time but I wasn’t the target audience. The ads definitely worked well; John said the Greater tripled their market share and ‘took people’s eye off the price’.
How to create lead generating homepages and other ideas learnt from John Dwyer
– Collect prospect and customer data for future marketing initiatives. Use competitions, surveys, entry forms, fishbowls, whatever you can do to get a mailing list.
– Use incentives on websites to capture sales leads, ie give away a free report on the pitfalls of X or a free guide on how to save thousands on Y. Another example was giving away a free teddy bear or other gift or competition in order to capture lead details.
– Reduce the importance of price in the sale, incentivise the sale with giveaways, eg. free beer with every 50 rolls of lawn turf sold. Make the sales pitch focused on benefits and sizzle and avoid discounting. This ‘remove price from the equation’ was something John went back to quite a few times and i would observe to be a core principle of all his marketing.
– Find a sell once to many strategy through live events and webinars. For example, collect all the addresses of people who have 4WDs in their driveways in the area near your store and invite them all to an event with free drinks and some content that will interest that audience. Another example given was for a bakery to hold a ‘high tea’ and invite locals to the event.
– Work out the problems people have with other providers in your industry and then work out how you solve those problems. That problem/solution combination can form the basis for website homepage and marketing content.
This problem/solution idea marketing was expanded on a lot in John’s talk and what is required to make use of such ‘problems’ in a marketing context looked something like:
- Identify the problem/complaint/dissatisfaction
a plumber could identify that people hate having blocked drains. - Exaggerate the problem so it appears more serious
if a drain is left blocked it can ruin your house and smell for days - Provide a solution to the problem
rapid response 24hr drain unblocking service - Show proof of the solution (eg. testimonials / past work)
video testimonial from someone who had a blocked drain fixed. - Call to action
call plumber xyz now to unblock your drains in under an hour.
JD had a bit to say about homepage layouts that result in enquiries and was fairly critical of ‘informational’ homepage designs that lacked strong problem/solution and free gift components. His default flow of page sections looked something like
— — —
Title
— — —
Problem/s
— — —
Solution/s
— — —
Welcome video
— — —
Free Gift
— — —
Testimonials
— — —
Portfolio / product examples
— — —
Benefits
— — —
Call to Action
— — —
Which for the most part I think is a pretty reasonable starting point, of course it depends on what information is available and the type of business. Whether it helps to publish the ‘problems’ top of the page that I’m less convinced of but if it is presented neatly and its clear that those problems are things the business fixes for the customer then great.
Those were some of the key takeaways I got from the day, it was fairly interactive and a few businesses were held up as review case studies to make it relatable. If you are invited to a 1 day John Dwyer presentation and haven’t heard him speak then it’d be worth the time out to understand his ideas. The ‘sell’ of his sales mentor program at the end was very soft and I don’t think anyone would have felt like it was pushed onto them.
I completely agree with the benefits of having some testimonials, and if they can be videos even better, they take a bit of planning and work to get them though.
I’d heard of JD and visited his ‘institute of wow website’ www.theinstituteofwow.com but had not seen him present and received an invite to a workshop he was holding so I went along to his 1 day marketing education training along with Luke Fielding from Reach Local, Blythy from NewFM and Dave Eddy. It was a pleasant surprise to also meet up with a few of our clients there including Cath from Aria Kitchens (www.ariakitchens.com.au), Rob and Danielle from SRO Group (www.srogroup.com.au) and Brian of (www.briandesign.com.au).
What else happened this week at jezweb…
Setup an ebay store connected to WordPress/WooCommerce shopping cart so that we can easily list the products on www.itti.net.au on http://stores.ebay.com.au/ittiau
Working out how the product listings merchant part of google adwords functions so that we can link a shopping carts products into the little product picture ads in a google search for itti.
More sites added to our new jezweb website, www.jezweb.com.au and additions to the portfolio section, www.jezweb.com.au/portfolio
Launch of the website for John W Phillips Plumbing – www.jwpplumbing.com.au
Updated the pricing and options for our seo services – www.jezweb.com.au/seo
Added new guides for email setup and settings on the ‘help for jezweb clients’ page, www.jezweb.com.au/help-for-clients
Google Star Ratings
Having a star rating on google, womo, truelocal, yellowpages etc is a great way of increasing the google overall star rating for a business. I’d be very appreciative if you would like to take a moment to leave a rating for jezweb – https://plus.google.com/+JezwebAuweb/about?gl=US&hl=en-US&review=1
If you’d like more info on how to get star ratings in google for your website let me know.