It’s a dog eat dog world when it comes to devising valuable content marketing solutions. Knowing the important areas of focus will keep companies from being left in the dust. But what should you focus on first? Typical answers range from the homepage to media files, but the results of Dreamforce 2013 show that the new answer is something entirely different. You should focus on communication with your customer through a strong “contact us” page.
All too often the contact us page is the ugly stepsister who has been forgotten one too many times. It usually is bland and is rarely updated. Before delving into the results of Dreamforce 2013, let us first focus on the important influence that the contact us page has on your content marketing solutions. A webpage is designed to attract unique visitors. Upon attracting said viewers, the site is meant to entice people to click further, subscribe, purchase a product, or more generally speaking, to become a customer.
With this hierarchy of goals in mind, let’s talk Marketing 101.
- You have a great idea.
- You pitch your idea to the public.
- Public opinion weighs in.
- The public loves the idea and wants to purchase.
- They contact you.
So why do so many companies forget about the contact us page? The contact us page is your final chance to ‘wow’ your customers. It is the final impression that a viewer will have before they a) contact you or b) give you their personal contact information. It is critical to business development that your contact us page contains an easy to fill out form that matches the rest of your company branding. Of equal importance is your company’s response time to submitted inquiries.
This year 5257 companies attended Dreamforce 2013. Insidesales.com conducted company analysis of the 5257 companies, to come up with the following statistics.
- 1811 (34%) companies did not have a website that contained a functioning web contact us form.
- 3446 companies received a contact form submission.
- 1368 companies (40%) did not respond to the submitted contact form (lead)
- The average response time by phone was 40 hours and 56 minutes.
- The median response time by phone was 4 hours and 8 minutes.
- 38 companies responded within the ideal time of 5 minutes.
Research conducted in 2007 by Dr. James Oldroyd showed that if a company attempts phone contact within five minutes after an Internet inquiry has been submitted on their website, there is a greater chance of retaining the customer and making a sale than if it takes 30 minutes or longer after submission. If the point of a website is to attract leads, then companies need to be more proactive about contacting Internet inquiry leads. Shockingly, only 27% of company generated leads are spoken to by an actual salesperson. This means that on average, 73% of the leads gathered by marketing departments are never spoken too. And we all know what happens when you don’t speak to leads – they move on to more responsive companies.
The moral of Dreamforce 2013 is pretty clear. Prominently display your contact us page; add a simple contact us form; and manage the submissions. These three simple steps will go a long way to ensuring that you are the industry leader of the content marketing pack, and not left behind in the dust of forgotten leads.