When it comes to Internet marketing, getting visitors to your site is only half the battle.
In social media marketing, there are metrics that matter–likes, shares, retweets–but they’re certainly not the whole story.The same applies to your overall marketing strategy.
While gaining leads and driving traffic are utterly essential, and certainly signs of a successful online marketing strategy–they are not the end of the road by any means. The ultimate goal of any online marketing campaign is to grow your business by boosting sales, maximizing profits, and seeing the biggest returns on investment possible.
In order to do that you have to make sure you’re not just driving searchers to your site, but turning those passer-bys visiting your site into paying customers supporting your business.
And that means having a killer conversion rate optimization campaign.
If you want to start seeing your visitors taking action and your sales soaring, here are just a few simple building blocks to keep in mind that lay at the foundation of any effective conversion campaign:
Understand Your Marketplace
Understanding your market–and how your business fits into that market–is the first step to creating any successful online marketing strategy. Think about where your traffic is coming from and pay attention to your position in your industry, in relation to your competitors, and in the eyes of your customers. Use this information to help tap into the markets and traffic sources that will bring the most business, not just visitors.
Get to Know Your Site Visitors
They tell you to keep your friends close and your enemies closer for a reason. That’s why it’s essential to get to know your site visitors, especially the ones who aren’t converting.
Look to determine the types of visitors you’re getting, what their intentions are when they land on your site, and why they’re leaving by identifying problems in the user-experience, collecting (and comprehending) feedback, seeing what your visitors are saying on social platforms and review sites about you, about your competitors, and more.
Identify Your Strengths… and Play to Them
Find out what it is that makes customers want to convert. What are your company’s core strengths? Why are you special? What’s your unique selling proposition? What can you offer visitors? Determine which of your business’ assets is most appealing to potential customers and design in ways that highlight those products, display those features, play to those assets.
Design Pages that Perform
Create a framework for what you want in (and from) your landing pages.
Focus on compelling calls to action, design elements, usability and more. Work to answer who, what, where, and why–straight away. Pay attention to what’s above the fold. Use meaningful graphics, content that motivates, and icons with a purpose.
Landing pages need to get leads where they’re looking to go and prompt visitors into becoming customers by being persuasive, providing a streamlined funnel that moves visitors towards an end action, and offering a phenomenal, user-friendly experience.
Cary Out a Thorough Testing Strategy
Come up with a game plan–and follow through.
Recognize that you’ll need to test as much as possible to figure out what works, and what doesn’t. Never assume, or worse, try to guess, why your site is underperforming, what’s making site visitors behave in certain ways, what’s wrong with a particular landing page, or what will fix the problem. Create experimental versions of your pages and conduct extensive testing and analysis. A/B test to determine which version of a page performs the best so that you can start seeing a noticeable difference in conversions.
Expand What Works Into Other Platforms and Don’t Stop Experimenting
A great design, a killer call-to-action, a strategy that seals the deal every time–each of these can be adapted for more than just a landing page on your site. There are other platforms besides landing pages where your business could most likely benefit from an increased conversion rate. Try implementing what works like an effective call-to-action, a particular branding design or aesthetic element, appealing offer, etc) into your social media campaigns, a business listing, your Adwords copy, and more.
And don’t stop experimenting. If you think you have a conversion rate that can’t be improved, think again, there is always room for improvement–especially when it comes to gaining new customers, boosting sales and growing your business.