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How agencies can mitigate the Coronavirus impact on clients

The way it was (BC – Before Coronavirus)

Before Coronavirus, A1WebStats offered our service as a white label available to agencies.

The focus ‘before Coronavirus’ was for agencies to create accounts (white labelled as the agency) for clients who had two needs:

  1. To identify the names of companies that visited their websites, and what those companies looked at page by page.
  2. To better-understand where websites and marketing could be improved, through the use of detailed analytics that are stronger than Google Analytics.

If you look at our website page that covered the free 60 day trial of our white label you’ll see that it had a very clear message of utilising our system in order to gain more business for agencies, at the same time as clients of agencies gaining more business from the proactive work done.

Times have changed.

The service we offer is still the same, but the importance of it to agencies has increased substantially.

In brief: clients need the skills of agencies more than ever, and agencies need clients more than ever.

This page focuses on our view of how everyone can pull together in the most productive way, and where we, A1WebStats, would be pleased to be a part of that.

 

Now is the time to be proactive

Whether you consider yourself to be an agency, web developer, marketing professional, or anything else that provides digital services to your customers, your clients will need you more than ever in the weeks and months ahead.

Your proactivity will be what makes the difference between your clients weathering the Coronavirus storm … or not.

 

Declines in website visitors traffic

Most of your clients (if they haven’t already) are going to see decreases in numbers of visitors to their websites, and there will be less business to be gained.

A1WebStats is a product that has been tracking millions of visitors to thousands of business websites worldwide since 2012.

When taken collectively, our data shows a pattern of increases and decreases of website visitors (to the websites we track).

Our recent accumulated data echoes data that you will have seen from other resources – significant declines in website visitors.

See, for example, the section titled ‘Organic traffic is down in most industries’ within https://neilpatel.com/blog/coronavirus/, which includes this chart showing organic website traffic declines in most sectors …

coronavirus traffic declines neil patel

 

We told you so …

Here at A1WebStats we have been saying (for many years):

Businesses need to be working with their digital professionals to ongoing strengthen their websites and the effectiveness of the marketing that drives traffic to their websites.

The message often doesn’t get acted upon because of a variety of reasons including:

  1. The business feels they’re doing OK
  2. The business has staff/external resources that are not doing a good enough job of making their online presence as strong as it needs to be.
  3. The business doesn’t want to make the time for making things better and prefers to throw more marketing budget at the problem of not getting enough sales.

Coronavirus WILL mean that businesses have to work a lot harder to get enquiries and sales from potential customers.

Each business will get less visitors to their website, which means they have to convert (to enquiries/sales) more of the visitors that they do get.

Each visitor that looks at a product or service page, but doesn’t make contact, is potentially someone who will find what they want on a competitors’ website.

That’s where YOU can help, and contrary to what you may have experienced before, your clients are likely to be much more receptive to your help than they have been historically.

Receptive because they fear for the survival of their businesses.

You may though have some clients who believe that when Coronavirus goes away, their business will get back to where it was before.

They are wrong – very wrong.

In the period from before Coronavirus to when the world gets back to normal, many businesses will have focused a lot more on their website and marketing strategy.

They have more time to do that now, and they will be preparing to come back fighting.

Those that do nothing now are going to find it tough to survive in a post-Coronavirus business world.

 

 

How you can help in the most sensitive way

Answering their biggest pain point

You need to be asking your clients what their biggest current pain point is.

They may generalise ‘lack of enquiries and sales’, but you can hopefully focus them on a particular product or service type.

You could go as far as saying:

“If there was one product or service that you could gain more enquiries about ASAP, what would it be?”

That becomes the starting point for dialogue.

If you know what’s most important to them, then you can definitely benefit them via assistance from A1WebStats.

We’ll explain more further down about how we become a useful part of the website success jigsaw.

For now, the key point is to find out what your clients want increased enquiries about/sales of, more than anything else.

 

 

Becoming their partner and not supplier

We have focused on this subject a lot in this page about the agency-client relationship, but in summary, helping your clients through a rough time is going to strengthen your bonds with them for the future.

This means you may need to be more flexible than usual.

Your clients are less likely to have fluid budget to spend on how you can help them, but if you don’t find a way to help them then you could lose them as a client eventually anyway (particularly if their business goes under or they suffer significantly and feel you weren’t supportive enough to them).

Here’s what your client doesn’t want to hear you say:

We can see your website traffic has decreased as a result of Coronavirus, and we’ve identified £XXXX expenditure you can pay us to make your website stronger and your marketing more effective, so that you can gain more from the lower levels of visitors that you’re getting.

What they do want to hear you say is more like:

Coronavirus is impacting you and all your competitors, and there are a lot less people actively in the market to buy what you offer.  We’ve identified several ways that we can strengthen your website and marketing so that you gain more business short-term, and also ensure that you are stronger than your competitors when we have all got through the Coronavirus problem.  In addition, we want to make it easier for you by spreading the cost of that over a 12 month period so that there’s minimal impact on your valuable cashflow.

If you wanted to go further than this, you would find some ‘wins’ for your client that you undertake for them at no charge to help them out, with only the expectation that when they are in a better position, they’ll remember their partner in success.

 

How you can help them and how A1WebStats can help you

You don’t have to get our help at all if you don’t want to.

You are of course free to go to your clients with suggestions of how you can help them strengthen their online proposition to help them recover from the impact of Coronavirus and build strength for the future.

Where you may want to consider us is to utilise our A1WebStats software to help you identify the biggest opportunities.

You can do that for free – either create an end user 30 day free trial that you set up under their company name but with your contact details,  or as part of the 60 day free trial of our white label offered to agencies.

Either way, we’re on hand to show you how to use data about all their website visitors to identify opportunities to strengthen their websites and marketing activities.

You’re thinking: I can do that with Google Analytics.

But you’d be wrong – Google Analytics presents a very weak view of what’s actually going on with each individual website visitor.

A1WebStats allows you to focus on individual products and services, and identify problem areas that can then be fixed by you – the digital professionals.

In addition, A1WebStats will also give your clients a view of the identifiable companies that have visited their websites.   This can be seen in summary form …

Visiting companies summary

It can also be seen at the detail level of what each visiting company viewed page by page, as in this example:

Visiting company example

Such extra information could be very useful to your clients who:

  1. Have staff that would follow up on companies that they know have been looking at their website.
  2. Have competitors who aren’t tracking such information and so will lose out on the opportunity.

Obviously, with the current position of most companies having their staff working remotely at home, you won’t (as at late March 2020) see large numbers of identifiable companies.   However, the A1WebStats system will still be tracking visitors to websites and even though they will often be anonymous, they are still likely to be ‘company people’ (working from home).

Take, for example, this visitor to the website of a business that makes bottle labelling machines …

covid-unidentifiable-visitor

The red circled part is the A1WebStats system showing what it knows about that visitor.  That translates to them being on a BT line, but there’s nothing identifiable about that company.  However, based on the page by page movements on that website, it was clearly a company person who visited that website from a location outside of their normal working environment.

What matters here are the patterns.  The image above shows that the visitor spent most time on a page about a product called the P220.  When the customer combines all visits to that page and compares it to the number of enquiries, they will have a view of how well (or not) that page enabled enquiries to be gained.   That then leads to further investigation and looking at the visitor paths of everyone who got to that part of the website, and working out what’s missing that would enable higher enquiries to be gained.

 

Taking action

Here are the facts:

  1. Many of your clients are going to experience signficant decreases in business because of the impacts from Coronavirus.
  2. You have the choice whether or not to proactively help them in a way that considers the pain they will be in, but that will ultimately benefit your relationship for the future if you do help them.
  3. The A1WebStats product (which is available free as a 30 day trial or even longer as part of a 60 day white label trial for agencies, covering many of your clients) will give you more insights than can be gained in other ways.  In addition,  our experts are on hand to help you interpret the data and how you can use that information to implement changes that will benefit your clients.  It’s there as an option for you to consider.

Whether or not you decide to let our software and expertise help you to help your clients, it’s vital to note this key point:

It’s extremely likely that many of your clients are going to experience business pain in the weeks and months ahead.   Coronavirus and the after-effects are very unlikely to disappear quickly and you are in a position to help your clients through those tough times.

In our view, the proactive digital professionals will become closer partners with their clients and those that aren’t will lose those clients to others who are.

White labelled A1WebStats, being free for 60 days, will help you to help your clients to weather the pain they will be going through and come out the other side with a stronger online presence than before Coronavirus.

If you have any questions about this, please do reach out to us via any of the methods on our contact page.

 

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