Getting More Decision Makers to Visit Your Site

One question that came up a few times in various guises on my survey into the top questions about getting clients online was “how to get more decision makers to my site?”.

Many people reported getting a decent amount of traffic – but it seemed as if most visitors were “tyre kickers” or junior staff rather than the decision makers who could hire them.

This is indeed a challenge for online marketing.

With offline marketing – particularly outbound marketing we can be more targeted in our approaches. We can write directly to decision makers. We can ensure the networking events we go to have a preponderence of senior clients. When we’re running a seminar we can invite only decision makers and potential buyers.

But with inbound marketing we can’t stop junior staff and non-decision makers clicking on links to our site or finding us on search engines.

We can, however, maximise the chances of attracting decision makers.

When we write our articles and blog posts we can focus on topics of more interest to senior staff and decision makers.

For example, instead of writing about specific selling skills, I could write about how to build the selling skills of your organization.

The first topic is of general interest. The second is only interesting if you’re in a senior role.

You can also write about the decision that has to be made itself. An article on “what to look for when hiring a leadership coach”, for example, is primarily of interest to people looking to hire a leadership coach.

You can also optimize your site for buying related keywords rather than just information seeking keywords.

How do you know the difference between a buying keyword and an information seeking one? Look at how many pay-per-click advertisers there are for the keyword and how long the ads have run for.

A large number of PPC ads that have been running for a long time indicates that someone must be making money from that keyword. If what they’re promoting is similar or equivalent to your services then the chances are that it’s also a buying keyword for you.

** To “spy” on what ads have been running for what length of time and who’s been running them I recommend the Keyword Spy tool. The free version allows you to inspect adwords ads for keywords or sites and see how long they’ve been runnign and whether they’re profitable. The firefox toolbar also gives a host of useful seo information.

If you get a lot of traffic from inbound links, try to get links from the sort of sites your target decision makers visit – sites that focus on leadership issues, for example. Or if you use pay-per-click on google’s content network – restrict your ads to those types of sites too.

You can even target an older demographic, or managing director/president/chief executive type profiles if you’re using facebook ads.

Also, don’t overlook the value of clicks from more junior people. It’s often the case that a senior decision maker will ask a more junior person to research potential suppliers for them. Or a raving fan of yours at a lower level in an organisation may recommend you up to a more senior executive. I’ve personally won a number of clients where the initial search has been performed by a more junior person.

Finally, you need to recognize that to some degree it’s a numbers game. If for every hundred clicks you only get 5 from senior decision makers, then your easiest route to getting more visits from senior people may be to just increase your overall traffic. Double your traffic and you’re probably going to double the number of decision makers who visit your site. Often this “brute force” approach is the easiest to take.

Tags: internet marketing strategy