Content Marketing Today

Content Marketing Pays Off on the Bottom-line in Australia

How BiteMark teaches small and medium-sized businesses to reinvent their online presence to deliver dramatic increases in sales, leads and profits.

“We are really thinking like publishers,” says Brett Gilbertson of Bitemark.  In terms of content marketing,  “It’s been  a complete mind shift.”  This applies equally to websites and to eNewsletters.  Brett’s company are recognized today as online marketing experts Down Under.

For Brett and his clients, it’s all about driving measurable results.  Bitemark has made a study of what works and what doesn’t.  They are continually fine-tuning their efforts to be certain that they drive sales and profits on behalf of their clients.

We can learn a lot from their no nonsense approach to content marketing.

Melbourne-based Bitemark didn’t start out to teach their Australian customers how to create websites that prompted action, leads, and sales for their clients.  But they wound up filling a void they hadn’t known to exist.

They first offered software solutions that enabled web professionals to build sophisticated websites.  But technology wasn’t the answer to creating results driven websites.

Bitemark’s content creation expertise evolved only after they realized that the need for relevant content wasn’t understood by web developers or their clients. 

They learned that the vast majority of businesses were clueless about creating web sites that produced leads and sales.  In fact, Director of Marketing, Brett Gilbertson estimates that fewer than 10% of small to medium size businesses understand the importance of content marketing.

As BiteMark puts it on their website:

Unfortunately, most of the time…businesses do this with their websites:

• Talk about themselves more than their customers
• Use jargon and stuff that their customers don’t understand
• Make it difficult for their customers to find them
• Distract them with unnecessary sizzle and clutter
• Hide behind their websites by not giving out contact details
• Leave their customers wondering what to do next
• The list goes on…

It’s not confidence inspiring. The upside for you is that it’s not hard to stand out with your web marketing.

Gilbertson stresses that the ideal solution integrates a solution oriented web site, effective search engine optimization, and a blog.  “This is a very powerful combination,” according to Gilbertson.

He notes that it’s essential to understand what problem your target customers are trying to solve—and then to make it obvious on your website that your company is ready, willing, able to solve that problem.

Success Stories

The focus on content that assures visitors that you can provide solutions is delivering measurable results for clients such as a Ace Mobile Mechanics and Fort Knox Self Storage.  Each client was struggling with typical first generation websites that offered little incentive for visitors to move toward a purchase.

Fort Knox Self Storage now has a visually appealing, action oriented site that makes it obvious why you would want to store your stuff with them.  They have increased the number of leads substantially with an impressive 4-5% conversion rate.

Ace Mobile Mechanics suffered from a web site that presented them as “the cheapest in town” and lacked even a phone number to contact them.  At the time, their primary source of leads was the Yellow Pages in which they were spending $100,000 per year.  They invested $10,000 with Bitemark for a 10 page website that is delivering an astonishing 19% conversion rate.  Their web presence is now their lowest cost source of leads.  This year it will edge out the Yellow Pages in the total number of leads.

Relatively small online investments are producing dramatic results for Bitemark’s clients.  Their biggest challenge—and perhaps yours as well—is convincing traditional marketers to change the way they think about marketing. 

As Gilbertson says, “We are really thinking like publishers.” Convincing their clients to make that mind shift has not been easy; but it has been well worth the effort based on the bottom line results their clients are achieving.