According to Rabobank, we will see increasing activity in almost all SME sectors this year. The biggest growth is expected in business services, so the battle to benefit from this growth is now increasingly being fought online.

Online investments

SMEs no longer get away with an online brochure or a static website with contact details and press releases. Even in business services, you don't really exist if you don't blog, invest in online findability or appear on the first page of google. So we invest heavily in that too.

From online to offline: call to action

Organisations are constantly generating relevant visitors. The moment you then have a relevant visitor on your site, the key is to entice this visitor with a "call to action". The definition of call to action from wikipedia: Call to action, or CtA, is a term used in marketing to persuade potential buyers to take a specific action after receiving an advertising message, such as ordering the product, calling a phone number or downloading a white paper. So this is when the hitherto online contact moves to offline in many cases. In fact, often organisations want the customer to get in touch and thus call or email.

The value of online investments

Online investments are worthless the moment the offline follow-up to the online call to action is not optimal. In a nutshell: You have been found, a potentially interested party wants to contact you. If you then don't pick up the phone quickly, answer a chat or respond to an email, you still aren't selling anything. Online investments are therefore only really valuable if the offline follow-up of leads also matches your (potential) customer's expectations. So think carefully about this offline follow-up.

How do you set up offline follow-up?

It's all about customer expectation. Make sure you know what your customer expects and exceed this expectation. Do you want your call to action to achieve that a customer calls you? Then make sure you can also be reached at the times that matter. The same goes for all channels. Make sure you can be reached to answer a call to action -within a timeframe that the customer wants. Questions you should ask yourself in this follow-up are:

• What deadlines are acceptable to my customers? Answer the phone within 20 seconds? Answering an e-mail within 24 hours? If you have insight into this, you can design your internal processes to preferably exceed these expectations.
• What is my competition doing? Does your competition answer calls to action until 5pm? Then consider doing so until 9pm.
• What channels do you offer? Omninchannel is the magic word, but are your (potential) customers waiting for WhatsApp? Is it customer-centric to work with a reply form? Again, the same applies: make sure you know what your customers want and arrange that for them.

In short

Online continues to grow. Potential customers orientate more and more online and buy more and more online. However, there is still a moment when online contact turns into offline contact, often the call to action is the transition moment. Make sure you think carefully beforehand about how you organise that call to action, attune it to the needs of your (potential) customers and ultimately follow it up. If you don't do this, it is pointless to invest capital in online presence and findability.