Is one of your objectives to increase your business’s website revenue? You have to tune in to this episode today! Michael “Buzz” Buzinski, the CEO of Buzzbizz Media, discusses how you can maximize your website’s potential with proven strategies for commercial contractors. The Rule of 26 states that by increasing your average revenue per client, the conversion rate from your website, and the traffic from your website by 26%, you’ll get a compounded output of 100% more revenue from your website. Michael added that symbiotic relationships makes you or take you from a 50 million company to a hundred million. Take careful notes, and let’s dive right into that interview.
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Maximize Your Website’s Potential: Proven Strategies for Commercial Contractors
Find your voice, know your website metrics, and keep your clients front and center – because a client-centric approach is key to success in the competitive world of commercial contracting
No one is going to come to your website, click on a button, and purchase a $50 million contract from you. What they’re going to do is they’re going to use your website as a tool to get to know, trust, and like you. That’s why I’m very happy to welcome Buzz Buzinski to the show. He’s a lifelong entrepreneur and a digital marketing thought leader. He’s also a bestselling author.
His company is all about helping you to develop website strategies that attract and convert the right clients with the right projects and locations. If you want to learn how to do that practically from a strategic point of view, tune in to this episode. This is an episode that you can tune in to twice because of the variety of different tactics and strategies that we talked about. What you need to know is how to nail your voice, how to know your numbers, and how to grow your business with the right clients, projects, and locations. Buzz knows how to help you with that. Take careful notes and tune in to it more than once. Share it with other people in your organization who would benefit from this. Let’s dive right into that interview.
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Buzz, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Eric. I’m assuming you’re the genius because there are only two of us here.
People ask me sometimes, “That’s a cocky name for a business, Construction Genius.” I tell them that it comes from the Edison quote, “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.” In my view, my clients and the folks in construction are the geniuses. I’m just adding that 1% of inspiration and help. That’s why you and I are chatting here. You are an expert when it comes to website marketing. I’d like to kick it right off by asking, what is the biggest misunderstanding that commercial contractors have when it comes to website marketing?
The biggest misunderstanding is that commercial contractors think that everything has to do with their connections face-to-face, which is partially true. The problem is they forget that when people meet you or they’re introduced to you and you have an initial conversation, they’re getting to know you. They want to know more. We do business with people we know, which is the first part. We got to meet you. Hopefully, you had a good conversation there, but then the trust issue. It’s short of hiring somebody right off the bat. General contractors are not just going, “You have a license. You can go work on my big project.” That’s not going to happen.
They’re going to go do some research on you. They’re going to take a look at what other people say about you. They’re going to look at some of the work you’ve done, and all those types of things. Guess where they’re going to go first? They’re going to go to your website. The misconception is that people don’t do that when there’s statistics show that over 67% of all B2B transactions start with a search query to find somebody’s website.
What you have on your website then becomes who you are. What most people don’t realize is that our websites are the only salesperson who says exactly what we want them to say, every day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. They never take a vacation. It never asked for a raise. It never complains, and yet we ignore it. General contractors are notorious for this because they see it as a line item expense versus a profit center.
The idea of know, like, and trust is a theme that we’ve hit on here before. What would you say are the vital elements on a website that helps to build trust when someone is visiting? We’re thinking about it immediately. How do you get that hook in there?
The biggest thing we get to dive into is talking to your perfect client versus talking about who you are. I love the saying that says, “Nobody cares what you know until they know how much you care.” In commercial contracting, we’re not very touchy-feely people, but we’re still human beings. We connect with other people just like everybody else. We might do it in a different fashion, which is fine. That’s how we approach that verbiage that we’re going to put on the top of our webpage, but we still have to connect.
If we’re talking about a website that is trying to attract a certain type of general contractor or subcontractor or whoever your perfect client is, when we’re constructing that top part of our website, the hook is not the features. It’s not the services, not about us, not about anybody else we’ve done business with, or any of that stuff. It’s the connection. I’m in the right place with the right people, now I want to know more.
Connection sounds a little warm and fuzzy. Tell us what you mean by connection.
I have a client who is a fractional CFO or Chief Financial Officer for commercial construction companies. The first thing he says on the top of his page is, “The contractors, fractional CFO.” If you’re a contractor and you’re looking for a CFO, you’ve now connected two dots, “I’m in the right place.” That is his slogan. That’s everywhere it is.
When you sit there and say, “Who’s Aaron?” Aaron is the contractor/CFO. What does that mean? He helps people to double their profitability and they go through that whole process there. What is in it for me? If I’m not looking for a fractional CFO or a CFO or anything even remotely related to financial help with my contracting company, I’m in the wrong place.
One of the instincts that contractors have sometimes is being all things to all people, “Do you do this?” “Yes.” “Do you do that?” “Yes.” What happens is you go to a commercial contractor, whether it’s a sub or a GC, and you look at all the stuff that they do. What are they good at? “We’re good at everything.” That’s not true. How do you help people overcome the challenge of having to pick one message? What’s the logic behind that?
That goes into one of the objectives of The Rule Of 26. We can discuss the actual rule itself, but one of the objectives is to increase your average revenue per client. In doing that, we exercise this workshop that identifies the most profitable clients a company has. We make money with most. There is a cashflow pretty much in every job, but not all jobs are profitable. Not all clients are a pleasure to serve.
We’re dealing with a lot of clients, and this comes from trying to be everything to everyone. The first year you’re in business, you’re getting all the business you possibly can because you need to pay the bills. In the second year, you started going, “We don’t like this.” You either price yourself out or you say, “We’re not giving proposals right now.” As you get more mature, you start looking at the swap of, “Do I accept some that are a little painful because as the owner, I don’t have to do all of those jobs anymore or do I stick with the ones we all love?”
There is wear and tear on your people dealing with what we call the PITAs. That’s Pain In The Arse customers. In our project management system, we have a PITA discount. When we say discount, we mean a banker’s discount because when a banker gives you a discount, you charge more. It’s okay but the problem is we can charge more to our PITA, but what is the wear and tear on the psychology of all of the people involved in that job?
You’re sucking the life out of your people, which makes them more inefficient. The less inefficient they are, the less profitable they are and your turnover goes up. There is a waterfall of issues right there. When we’re looking for the type of client that is a good fit functionally and profitably, why would you not want to only talk to those types of people?
I promise you this. There’s more business for all of us than we can even imagine. The trick now is getting the right business to the right customers and service providers. That’s why it’s a mindset shift to say that you don’t need all of the business because you could do less business and make more money if you’re only doing business with the most profitable of the prospects.
That’s absolutely true in construction. Help me with this. If I’m an owner of a $50 million project, and I’m looking for a GC to run the project, I’m not going to Click Here and Buy Now thing when I go to the website. I’m not buying something off of Amazon or anything like that. Not to get too granular too quickly, but what kind of calls to action or processes are you looking to take someone through when you’re looking to engage them and build trust when it comes to selling high-ticket commercial construction projects?
When we’re dealing with commercial contracting, the website is not necessarily there to sell anything. It’s to inform. The person who’s coming to your website who is looking for your service as a commercial contractor is looking to understand more about you, and whether you’re likable and trustworthy. There are three elements that we need to put in there. First, we talked about connections.
Once we’ve made that connection, we say, “This is the right type of general contractor,” because general contractor is too general. “We are the ex-general contractor of this industry.” “I’m in that industry. I like that.” Once we’ve identified that, we can now start sitting there and say, “These are the problems that we solve for our clients. This is why people love doing business with us.”
We’re describing the types of work that we are the most proficient and profitable, and more enjoyable for our whole staff to do. Now they’re going, “I have those problems. They can solve a lot of my problems here.” They now understand that you care and you are the solution. Now, you’re going to give them social proof. You’re going to show some of the work. Maybe some case studies or pictures of some of the projects you’ve worked on, depending on what type of contractor you are.
I can find pictures of the work of any type of contractor and put them on a website, and the people who know, know. When you put electrical contractors and brand new circuit, “They ran the conduit nice and pretty. They had all the cables nice and pretty,” and all of those things. How a plumber does the foundation. Does that line up with stuff?
All of the little idiosyncrasies that make you the expert at what you do, you want to show that with pictures as much as possible. You want to show other people talking about how good of a job you did, how efficient you were, and how personable the staff was. They showed up on time with clean uniforms. Sometimes that is a big deal when you’re dealing with reconstruction, remodeling, and stuff like that, especially in commercial areas like hospitals and whatnot.
All of those things count. They’re all little pieces of a bigger puzzle. What you’re doing is you’re painting a picture of the perfect contractor, subcontractor, or general contractor. When I leave that, I might reach out to you through your thing, “Let’s talk,” but you probably already have my information. You’re probably going to use whatever email or phone number you already have on a business card somewhere, or jotted down from what somebody sent you, but the website did its purpose. If you are a contractor who has more pieces to the sales process, then you’re going to have a call to action that will make them make micro-transactions. These could be the checklist for picking the perfect electrical contractor.
What you mean are five things to look for when you’re picking the perfect electrical contractor or the pitfalls of hiring a general contractor and how to avoid them.
Something like that is a reiteration. They checkbox or set of bullet points of all the things you described on your website, and then they make the discussion.
One of the mistakes I’ve seen over the years is that marketers, whatever they’re selling, think they know what their client’s problems are. When they don’t know what the client’s problems are, they assume what they are. They don’t address them first. They just do features and benefits, but they don’t do anything linking it to a problem. If they do know what the client’s problems are, they don’t understand them in the words that the client would use. How is it that I understand my client’s problems? How do I articulate them in such a way that it resonates with the client as opposed to just resonating with me?
Assuming we understand our clients is the biggest mistake in marketing. What we forget to do is talk to our clients when we’re doing market research. Literally, it’s just having a conversation, “What do you like doing? What do you like? Why do you keep coming back to us? Why are we the top contractor on your list? Why am I the first person you call?” Just listen. Take note of the actual words they use. With that, then you’re going to go and do some other market research.
The first step is to listen to your current perfect clients on how they say things, and what vernacular they use to say them. What they say and how they say it is the most crucial part. If you start talking like your perfect client on your website, and your perfect prospect comes to your website and starts reading what is in their brain, “What connections you can make?” “I’m home. These people talk my language.” We were talking about, “I know those words. I love those words. You’re talking my language. Let’s go.” You want to do the same thing for the services you provide every time.
It’s as simple as talking to your clients and asking them why they do business with you.
“Why do you like doing business with us? What makes us better than the other contractors you work with? What can we do better?” When I do market research, I don’t just do market research to get more clients like them. I’m looking at ways I can provide better value for my current clients as well. I had a creative agency where we were the general contractor of marketing. We did it all. There are people who did business with us for years that didn’t know we did everything we did because we did not talk to our clients enough. We didn’t ask what other services could we provide that would be valuable to you.
I know general contractors build health care and life sciences. They might do a commercial ground-up, which are all very different types of projects. I want all of those people to contact me. Someone comes to the front page of my website and it’s not just like, “I replace windows and this is the window. Call me.” It’s much more complex than that. How does someone structure a website when their offerings are complex, and they’re in different segments of the market?
When you start talking about market segmentation, that’s when you have a nice pretty link up at the top that says, “Industries served.” Industries is plural. “They said the right thing here. We’re this type of contractor. We work with these types of X.” If you’re not in a single industry, then you’re going to step back on how targeted you are with your opening line on the top of your page. That’s fine.
Let’s assume that I at least need to be able to capture someone’s interest so that they look at the industry served, but there are multiple types of people. What is an example of a good tagline that might hook people from different industries so that they click on that industry? I know I’m getting a little granular here, but they do go to that industry-served tag. What do I do there?
That depends. There are a lot of assumptions that we’d have to go into because of that hook. Remember, we need to understand who our perfect client is. There’s got to be a common thread between all three of those industries for you to properly market to all three of them at the same time. If there isn’t, that’s a bigger problem. You haven’t truly identified why all three because there’s only one most profitable.
We need to understand who our perfect client is. Click To TweetIf you’re being honest about which one is the most profitable all the way down to the end, it’s like when we look at the NFL, everybody’s got the same scores as far as the wins and losses. They then go to the tiebreaker and then the tiebreaker. You might need to get down to that granular and get in there. If you get all your marketing good on that one, and you start nailing that faster versus fishing in five different parts of the pond at one time, you only have one pole. Use that pole. I have seen people who use visuals of three different types of structures that they like to work on or representations of three different industries they’d like to work with, with one combining hook across all three of those images.
When I talked to my clients about being profitable, it’s the right client, project, and location. If you’re located in just one area, but doing a variety of different projects, it could be the general contractor of choice in this geographic location or something like that. That’s just throwing out an idea.
That’s super easy. The nice thing about that is SEO if you Iowa or maybe you’re in the Midwest.
Tell us what SEO is.
Search Engine Optimization. Sometimes people know the problem, but they don’t know who. Not everything is a referral. It’s like, “I need a general contractor of this specialty.” If you have a specialty, that’s good because you might not know that person and nobody else is. “Bob is a guy but he’s busy right now. You’re not going to get him for six months.” Now, I got to go to the internet and start looking.
This is where the other 67% of people are doing. They’re going, “I’m looking for this specialty contractor for this type of work.” If your hook is, “I am this specialty type of contractor in this area,” and you’re spelling out what the area is, and they’re in that area, and all the other things are aligned, you’re going to be the one that comes up at the top. Guess what they are saying? “The best of this and this.” “That’s what I’m looking for.”
When you’re saying SEO, what’s important is that has a lot to do with the back-end stuff that you’re doing on your website. I’m not trying to get too granular. What I’d like to say to the audience is that if you don’t know what SEO is, you need to find out and you need to get someone in your business or someone from an outside consulting company to help you with that in terms of how you set up your website. Otherwise, you’re going to be missing out on a lot of stuff there.
You can give me a holler. If you don’t have somebody already, we’ll make sure that my email is there. I give a free consultation to get you started so you at least know what that looks like and what you can expect from it.
Let’s go back up to some of the stuff you’re talking about. One of the things that you talked about in terms of building social proof was testimonials. In your experience, what is the best way to get a testimonial? Should that testimonial be in video, written, or audio? Give us a little bit about that.
The short answer is all of the above. I did one for my fractional CFO. He had an electrical contractor who loved the work he did. They did a bunch of work for him. I’m in there. I’m doing some work for his client on their branding. While I was there, I said, “Can we set the camera here and talk about the work that Aaron is doing for you?” He goes, “Let’s do that.” At first, you have questions like we’re going to have a conversation, “How did you first meet Aaron? How’d you find Aaron? What did you like about Aaron? What kind of work did Aaron do for you? What’s the outcome of what Aaron’s work has done for your company?” Simple questions and keep it conversational.
You have that video editor cut that all into a little pretty montage of awesomeness. You put that and you mix it in with a written. You can either transpose what they said in verbally into a written form right below that. What I like to do is then have a case study right below that so that it spells out the ABCs of what happened.
If you’re the type of contractor who is good at efficiencies towards, “You’re already over budget, and your last contractor screwed the pooch. Now, you don’t have all the money in the world to get something. I’m not going to cut off my nose to spite your profits, but I will do XYZ for you so your bleeding is less. In my case studies, if I’m that type of person, I’m going to put out how I’m the most efficient X contractor because I do extra something.” You’re going to show that case study right there as proof.
You got the transcription of the video in written form, then underneath that a case study. There’s a triple-fold effect there of building that credibility. It’s not just the know, but the like and trust.
Also, the pictures because pictures worth 1,000 words. I’m now going to show you the work that happened. We know this wasn’t just some actor. It’s like, “That’s the work they did. That is cool.” If it is a notable project in your area that people are like, “I know that building. Make sure you put the building out the outside of the building. You might not have built the building.” The building is what people know. They don’t know the circuitry, plumbing, floors, or ceiling. They don’t care about the drywall. All of those things came into building that building. That’s what everybody sees.
Unfortunately, I know a lot of contractors have spent a bunch of money on their websites. Because they’re not experts, “I’m going to build my next project. I’m going to make sure we make some money on it. Here, let me write a check and give it to some dude to do something about my website.” What are the biggest pitfalls that contractors come across when they’re looking to upgrade their website? How might they be able to avoid some of those pitfalls?
If you have a website that’s not performing now, the worst thing you can do is hire another web developer. I don’t care how big of a firm it is. They are not a marketing strategist. Buzzworthy is an integrated marketing firm. Website building is something we do as a result of the strategies we create, not the other way around. There are two types of web developers out there. There are web designers and coders. They are the people who are good at making things pretty, and the people who can make things work. Very few have firms that do both. Those are the bigger firms and they’re great, but they’re tactical.
If you don’t have all the marketing strategies in line, all they’re doing is feeding off what you have. If they take a look at your website, maybe have a copywriter pretty it up. If there’s no marketing research to back up the strategy, the approach, the voice, and all these other things, then you’ve just prettied up a pile of crap. You just polished poop.
We’re talking strategy, which is big the picture. What are the pillars of good web strategy or the fundamentals that I’ve got to nail?
You’ve got to nail your voice. All the things we’ve talked about up to this point are the fundamentals of a good message. Market research, being specific, and being clear are big things. Those three things are gold. Most people don’t do that. They go, “Me. We. It’s all about me. We have been in business for 30 years.” Who cares if you’ve sucked for 30 years? Nobody cares until they know how much you care.
You got to nail your voice. What’s interesting about that is when we think about that, we then think of me speaking. What you’re telling us from what I can understand is it’s not when you’ve nailed your voice. It’s the prospect, the client, or the target person speaking on your website.
There’s a book by Donald Miller called StoryBrand. He talks about making your prospect the hero. Contracting is a beautiful thing because usually, the person looking for the solution is the person who has been tasked to be the hero. If you can make them the hero in the narrative on your website, they now put themselves into the hero’s journey. They see their success in your services. They’re buying their success, not your services at that point. If we put ourselves in our prospects’ shoes, they have been tasked to be a hero and solve a problem. If they come to your website, and they can hear and see their success through your services, they are now buying their success, not your service.
That’s fundamental right there. They can see their success through your services. They’re buying their success, not your services.
It’s tricky. Once you nail it, it’s beautiful.
We’ve talked about how to find that voice in terms of market research. What are the biggest mistakes people make in market research?
They don’t talk to their clients. They go out and look at other competitors in other regions that are very successful in the same niche. While that is one piece of it, your perfect client is in your region. Not all perfect clients in every region are the same. I had a general contractor in Illinois who looked at what a general contractor in Florida was doing. He says, “I want the same website as that guy. I just want our pictures.”
I looked at what they were talking about down there. I’m like, “They’re doing different work than you do up here. It’s a different region. They build things differently. They have to deal with different problems and all the other things that go along with them. The narrative is going to be completely off.” “I don’t care. That’s what I want.” “Sorry, we’re not going to do it.” “Why won’t you do it?” “Because it’s going to be crap, and my name is going to be on it. That’s a no-go. I’ve been in business for many years doing good work. Not just taking people’s money.”
We had to pass on that because they didn’t want to do it. I had another general contractor who took a look at three different types of contracting because he did all three of those types of contracting. He said, “I want to get a little bit of each of them on my website,” but then he didn’t have anything to back it up. You’re not going to be able to do any of that search engine optimization without any content to back that up.
If you have nothing to search on your website, there’s nothing for the search engine to pick up, “Sorry, we can’t do that project because you’re not willing to admit that you don’t have the expertise that you’re trying to say.” The biggest thing is trying to stretch the “Fake it until you make it” mentality. It’s a no-go anymore. People can figure that stuff out way too fast. There have been too many cons in every industry now that people are skeptical. They will go to the next step if they see any kinks in your armor.
How can someone take those first steps to begin to recreate or improve their website, hone in their message, and find their voice so that they can begin to drive revenue, maybe not directly, but indirectly through their websites?
We went over a lot of stuff. Eric brought up some good points and he pulled out good points from me that I usually don’t even get to talk about. This has been a gorgeous episode. What we should do is then summarize a little bit of those first steps. The first thing is to start talking to your perfect clients, the ones that everybody’s face lights up when they hear their name. When you’re not anxious to answer the phone when you see them on the caller ID, or when you don’t avoid opening up their email in your inbox, those people are the ones that you want to talk to. Take them to lunch and have a conversation. Have drinks with them. Do something nice for them, and show them that you appreciate it. During those conversations, find out why they appreciate you.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. Those symbiotic relationships are the ones that are going to take you from a $50 million company to a $100 million company because you’re going to replicate the most successful and efficient relationships. That sounds a little cold. Efficient and relationships are not juxtaposed usually, but that is what we’re looking for. We’re looking for a natural fit. The harder you have to make that connection, the more work it’s going to be to do that work. It’s like the magnets are on two pillars. They’re repelling each other. That’s your first step. Get clear with that, and then find out how many of those you have. Look at your market and say, “How many of those could we have?”
How do I find out that number?
If you’re $50 million, you already know. Every contractor I know that’s at $50 million knows their market. They just don’t know how to get to their market. They haven’t played with things like account-based marketing. That could be another show altogether. When we look at that and go, “There’s not a lot of those here,” does that mean we need to widen our footprint? Do we need to take a look at the second most profitable relationships that we have? Maybe there’s more there. That’s fine.
You basically milked the unicorn if you can’t find enough of that perfect. Let’s get close to perfect and find ways we can make those relationships more perfect. They won’t be as good as your unicorn, but at least we can work on making them better for ourselves, and then you do that. Once you have that, then call somebody like me. You can call me. I’d love to work with people that are in construction. I have clients that have been with me for twelve years that went from $7 million to $15 million to $50 million. The growth is about a lot of the work that we’re doing at the forefront, then it’s working through the industry changes over the years.
Everybody knows that construction has changed a lot in many years. That’s not a problem. Get somebody who can strategize for you. If you have a marketing director, have them research somebody. Don’t use your marketing director. They’re a director, not a strategist. You can use your director to execute strategy. I have clients that are over the $50 million mark. They have a full marketing department.
They bring me in to talk to their team once a month to keep them on strategic trajectories that are going to be profitable for their company. That’s all I do. We can facilitate what I would call the mom-and-pop where everybody is operational. They’ve been built upon the relationships of the owner, or maybe a couple of account project managers, and all the way up to full-fledged. They’ve got a full C-Suite and the whole nine yards.
Tell me a little bit about The Rule of 26 because I know that’s a book you’ve published. I think it has a lot to do with what we’ve talked about here.
The Rule of 26 states that if you increase your conversion rate from your website and that unique revenues from your website by 26%, you will get a compounded output of 100% more revenues from your website. That’s not necessarily a “Buy now,” none of that stuff. All the stuff we talked about here is creating revenue for your website.
That takes time.
The dot-com era taught us that mega-million or billion-dollar companies don’t all grow overnight. It takes time, even Facebook. It was not profitable for at least seven years. They were evaluated for their future ability to make money, but they were not profitable for a long time. In service-based businesses, that’s what I focus on only. Contracting is the biggest one in this. It’s not like you’re going to be able to go, “We’re going to double up.”
You don’t have the infrastructure. Most people do not have the infrastructure to double up in one year. You want to grow smart and grow profitably. I built multimillion-dollar companies because I was too good at marketing, and not good enough at my operations. It’s crap. We got to throw that away. Now I got to rebuild it so that I get the infrastructure right as we go back up.
What we’ve been talking about here is the whole idea of people buying from people that they know, like, and trust, and how our website, even in the commercial contracting space, is a vital element of developing relationships with people in that way. As we’re ending the interview here, what would you say are the 2 or 3 things that I need to focus on right away as the president of my construction company to make a difference in terms of my website presence?
I talked about it in my book. The most interesting piece is understanding your numbers. Most people don’t even know what their website is doing. That’s the one thing you can do because everybody has a website. If they don’t, they’re probably in a different echelon and that’s okay. Now we have to deal with getting you a website. Most of us have websites. Probably 9 out of 10 of us do.
Everyone here has a website. I can promise you that.
With that said, you have somebody who built that for you. Hopefully, you’ll be able to talk to that person and get your Google Analytics connected to it so that you can see the traffic that is coming to your website, and what’s happening with that traffic on your website. They can do that in one hour. Have them show you what those numbers are. Have them explain it to you. If they can’t, give me a call. I offer it in my book too. This is not just a special getting in touch with you.
My big thing is this. If you don’t understand your numbers, you don’t understand how to market because you don’t know what you’re trying to do. You don’t know what the goal is. Without a goal, you’re aimlessly going around. You’re going, “I hope something works,” then you’re hoping for another unicorn and stumble into it. We need to understand where you stand now and how bad or good is your situation with your website because that can dictate what your next step is. The first thing to do is to get clear or at least look at your numbers and understand what they’re telling you.
You need to understand where you stand now and how bad or good is your situation with your website, because that can dictate your next step. The first thing to do is to get clear or at least look at your numbers and understand what they're telling you. Click To TweetThis may not be possible, but tell me three numbers that I should be looking at when I’m trying to understand my numbers.
One is unique visitors. A lot of times, when we connect our Google Analytics or whoever does that for you, they forget to do this one thing. It’s very easy to do. If you’re doing your own, you can Google how to do this. You want to filter out the bots. Bots are just pieces of code that come in. They crawl our sites to then report back to the search engines to say, “This is what’s going on in this website,” for those who don’t know. You need to filter out the bots so we can see the human beings that are going to buy from us. How many of those are coming to our sites? How many new users versus repeat users? New users mean that what I’m doing in getting the word out is working. Repeat users mean that what I’m saying is useful and people are coming back for more information.
Unique visitors are number one, then you want to take a look at the conversion rate. That’s going to be a little more work because you’re going to have to have your IT or your web developer set up what conversions are for your website. It could be a click-to-call from your website, a Contact Us form, or a sign-up for our newsletter if you have a newsletter. Most contractors don’t have, but some type of call to action. It could be that checklist to download. You give them an email. You get the download or you email them the download so that you least have that or any of that. The third is your bounce rate. Your bounce rate is the rate at which users come to your site and don’t take any action, then that’s a bounce rate. You don’t want your bounce rate to be more than 51%. The lower the better.
Unique visitors, conversion rate, and then bounce rate. Those are the three numbers I need to look at right away.
Without looking at any other numbers and going very far into a bunch of analytics right this second, those will tell you whether or not your homepage is connecting with your visitors, how many visitors you’re getting, and whether they aren’t connecting or taking action. You could make it to where if they go to your Contact Us page, that’s a conversion. Whatever you consider a win is there. Make that part there.
That’s a good point for everyone to understand because they think you want to do it. I don’t have one million people calling me for contracts and I wouldn’t want that either. Whatever a win is, that’s a conversion. Maybe they watched a video, read a blog post, or they might call you one year from now when the project gets going.
What a lot of contractors forget. We talk about all the projects that could happen and then the ones that happened, that research, they are doing on somebody’s website. It should be yours.
You’ve been tremendously helpful. I know this is very practical, and people will be able to go back to this session because there’s a lot of information. Tell us a little bit more about your company and how people can get in touch with you.
Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing is a strategy-first digital marketing firm. We help service-based businesses increase the profitability of their online presence. I have my book that you can check out at Buzzworthy.biz. My email is [email protected]. If you’d like to check out The Rule Of 26, you can go to RuleOf26.com. It’s on Amazon as well.
Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing is a strategy-first marketing, digital marketing firm. We help service-based businesses increase the profitability of their online presence. Click To TweetWhere are you at?
Springfield, Illinois. I lived in Alaska for seventeen years and I’m a recent transplant.
I knew people back in the day in Springfield. If I’m visiting Springfield, what’s the one restaurant I need to hit?
For which meal? It depends.
I’m going out with a client to dinner.
Vele is a very nice restaurant. If you’re going to go for craft cocktails, you’re going to go to Curate. If you’re going to get a horseshoe which is very popular in Illinois, you’re going to go to Charlie Parker’s on First Street.
What’s a horseshoe?
Usually, it’s either a big piece of toast or a better french fries that is covered in meat and then cheese. You have breakfast and dinner shoes. You can put eggs on top. It is a gut bomb to be savored. I like mine with tater tots. I do tater tots cheese, and then some people put gravy on top instead of cheese or cheese and gravy, meat, and fries. Vele is a high-end Americana fusion restaurant with awesome craft mixed drinks, and good wine if you like wine. All of their food is basically farm-to-table style. They do it all well. Curate is all tapas. It’s the same style but just the bites. It’s more about drinking than it is eaten. Their bartenders are trained with the same folks. Those are good bars to go to.
I appreciate you coming to the show. You’ve been very helpful and very insightful. I do wish you all the best.
Thank you so much for having me.
It’s my pleasure.
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Thank you for tuning in to my discussion with Buzz. Feel free to check out his website, Buzzworthy.biz. Keep in mind he has that book The Rule Of 26. That can give you further insights into how to shape your website marketing strategies. Go to wherever you get your podcasts. Give our show a rating or review. I’m looking at Apple Podcasts. We have 131 ratings and 4.8 stars. I appreciate everyone who’s given it a rating. If you haven’t done that yet, go out to wherever you get your podcasts, Spotify, Apple, or Google. Give us a rating. Leave a review. That helps the show to get seen throughout the interwebs. I appreciate you tuning in to the show.
Important Links
- Buzz Buzinski
- The Rule Of 26
- StoryBrand
- [email protected]
- Amazon – The Rule Of 26
- Spotify – Construction Genius
- Apple – Construction Genius
- Google – Construction Geniu
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/MichaelBuzinski/
- https://www.VeleRestaurant.com/menu/
- http://www.CharlieParkersDiner.net/
- https://CurateSpringfield.com/
- https://www.Amazon.com/Construction-Genius-Effective-Hands-Leadership/dp/B0BHTRDY1T
About Buzz B`uzinski
