Know Your Goals - TFS Day 3

Knowing your goal is the probably one of the most important things when running a website. When people attend the Elite Retreat or when I do consultations (very rarely) the first question I ask is what is your goal for this site. It always amazes me people do not have a goal other then to "make money". For instance. My neighbor Brad Alderman (AKA the rooster) is a dentist and has his own practice at Coddington Dental. I recently had his website redesigned for him and I asked him what his goals for the website were. Now Brad pretty much had his site on the internet so he had a internet presence.. He never really thought out what the site could do for him. This is refered to (by me) as a brochure site. So being I am a internet marketer I wanted to take Coddington Dental to the next level. So I sat down with my friend and we talked some numbers... This things should pretty much apply to anyone.. You need to price out a new customer vs a returning customer. What items have good margins what doesnt... what are your demographics. After talking with Brad about these things I had a pretty good idea of what his goals SHOULD be. In talking with Brad he revealed something very interesting. Even though his clients range from 8-75 years old almost 80% of all the bookings are made by women 28-40 years old. BOOM big detail there. Also he dropped another interesting fact that these women almost always are very interested in cosmetic dentistry mostly teeth whitening services and there was a pretty good margin on those services. Just like with a website your best data you have yourself. You dont need to buy data from other sources use your OWN metrics. So now we have a goal. So now we know our goal: To get women ages 28-40. How we are going to achieve that goal: Do pay per click advertising targeting the Lincoln, Nebraska area and gender targeting for offering free teeth whitening (a huge value). We will use a special landing page on the site for this so we can track the success (and using google analytics goal tracking we will see what engines return the best ROI). Recap: By talking with Brad (our client) a short time I was able to determine what his goal should be just from his own metrics. Also doing the math the new customer acquisition far out weighed the small cost (to him) of 1 free teeth whitening. I have not done a case study or experiment that I shared with readers for a while so I will be publishing updates to the Coddington Dental experiment. First we are going to run up the site a bit for conversion and build a custom landing page. Brad has offered to let me be very open with everything we are doing so if you link to it make sure you give him a link at coddingtondental.com, Stay tuned- Know Your Goals - TFS day 3