Are you experiencing a steady flow of traffic to your website but end up falling far behind in terms of lead conversions and sales when you crunch the numbers monthly or quarterly? Are you burning a tone of advertising dollars on your digital marketing plan but not getting any tangible results? Have you changed your marketing plan a couple of times expecting a positive outcome, only to same dismal output…or even worse?
If you fall into any of these categories, then you’re doing something wrong with your digital marketing plan which is having a negative impact on your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
While driving traffic to your brand is a key factor in your company’s success, it is nothing but vanity metrics if the high figures from Google Analytics aren’t translating to $$$ on your account reports at the end of every month.
Often, it’s thought that traffic should = more sales. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.
You can burn a boat load of money to drive a million hits to your business website and end up with $0,000,000.00 in sales revenue. Conversely, you can spend a tenth of same ad budget and get fantastic ROI. So how do you balance this seemingly abysmal equation?
It lies in getting the key things that directly impact your CRO right.
The good news is by the time you are done reading through this article, you will figure out 3 grave sins you’ve been committing that has negatively impacted on your digital marketing conversion rates.
Should you repent of these 3 sins starting today, you would most likely see positive results the next time you pull up the score cards. Without further ado, let’s get right down to it.
You Are Evangelizing to the Choir:
This is the biggest sin of the three. Not knowing EXACTLY who your target audience is.
Understanding your target market is arguably the first and most important task that needs to be carried out and included in any winning digital marketing plan. But surprisingly, it appears to be the one task most marketers devote the least time to, or boycott totally.
Lots of advertisers do not understand that this is the task which separates a profitable business from a failing one because for a business to make steady sales, two things have to be done right:
- It has to figure out, with surgical precision, who it is speaking and selling to
- Structure its sales message using the perfect language that renovates with that audience
With this established, it is easy to see how most businesses tow the wrong lane at the starting point of their sales journey, then wonder why all of that advert dollars and traffic is not bringing in sales.
If you really want your digital marketing efforts to pay off, you have to spend most of your time on this very vital step. You have to go above and beyond making random persona sketches (as most marketers do), spend quality time to know what your target REALLY is — from their personal and professional interest, to minute details like what brand of coffee they have for breakfast!
A good starting point is carrying out an extensive and comprehensive market research on specific features that your product or service is offering. By so doing, you will have a clear picture of idea what, each segment of your target audience wants to see from your company, and how much they’re willing to pay for it. You can find an in-depth guide on how to go about this perfectly in this article from Crazy Egg.
You are Optimizing for the Wrong Kind of Traffic:
There is no gain-saying that Google, as a search engine, is the biggest, smartest and most effective tool there is when it comes to finding the right information on the internet.
Google does a very good job at running through pages, reading context and spitting out information that matches what you are actually searching for, but as with anything created by a humanoid, it has its own lapses.
Let’s say for example you just launched a website development agency, and hearing how everyone on the www sings that “content is king”, you take the decide to open a blog on a sub-directory of your agency website to pull in traffic and leads.
Tons of awesome blog entries and 20,000 email subscribers later, you find out that despite the cute numbers you’re getting, you have made zero sales!
You do a little digging and eventually get to find out that those nicely written content on “xyz ways to speed business growth using tech” has been doing a perfect job at making your website visible to the wrong audience — e.g., pulling in “Sophomore Year Economic majors” who are looking to submit an assignment, instead of pulling in actual business owners who are interested in such topics – and could become your customers somewhere along your funnel.
That is exactly how several businesses are ranking well on page one of Google for keywords and pulling in crazy traffic, but going home penniless at the end of the day.
In other to avoid this, you need to first of all put in time to fully understand how Google rank websites, before you waste an ounce of sweat trying to rank for keywords that wrongly projects products or services your business seeks to sell.
The next step is to find out how to improve your website’s google ranking. The intent is to ensure you rank for the RIGHT keywords that align with what your value propositions.
When these two things are put in place, you should begin ranking for the RIGHT kind of keywords, attracting the RIGHT kind of traffic and hitting the RIGHT sales conversions numbers. See? It’s all about getting it right!
However, if the whole Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process seem like rocket science to you, or you don’t have the luxury of time to sit around waiting for Google to give you that rank love, you can quicken things up by running paid ads. But to avoid wasting so much money, make sure that you first understand, and are selecting the paid traffic source that most suits your business needs.
You Aren’t Making a Compelling Offer:
Another mortal sin that businesses make (which The Godfather himself couldn’t condone as far back as 1846) is not coming up with offers hot-enough to compel your target audience to buy.
It is often said in direct marketing circles that “a strong website copy with a weak offer will lead to poor sales, while a poor website copy with a strong offer will lead to better sales”. This can’t be said any better!
The kind of offer you give your target audience either makes or breaks your digital marketing efforts. Correcting sins 1 and 2 above without setting your offer right is tantamount to pouring water into a basket – wasted efforts!
Highly compelling offers are so powerful, that they could tilt “on-the-fence” buyers to your purchase list and make them pull out their credit cards to buy from you.
Making compelling offers is a form of art which you only become good at with practise. If you are just starting out with this, you can read up articles on how to create compelling marketing offers to get you started.
However, of you’re too lazy to read, learn and come up with offers from scratch? Here is a cheat sheet that outlines 20 offer ideas for marketing your business. Don’t let the Godfather hear you are bereft of offer ideas after going through this list.
Conclusion
Getting returns on digital marketing spend and effort is much easier if you approach it strategically and put the right elements in the right places.
If you are presently struggling with getting positive results for your digital marketing efforts, it’s apparent that you have been doing something wrong. Thankfully, this points are enough to set you on the right sail and help troubleshoot your digital marketing conversion issues.
However, if the day to day running of a business is hard enough for you, and you’ll love to commit all of that ‘dirty’ digital marketing work to an experienced and dedicated team, who would fetch your business the best results that it deserves, you can reach out to us for a free consultation. We are looking forward to hearing from you and helping you out with your digital marketing needs.
We are Charisol, a software development agency with a community of talented software developers that leverage on the “work without walls” culture to provide solutions for clients around the world. Our services span Software designing, App development, Digital marketing, Social Media Marketing, Content Writing & Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation. Follow us here on Medium or on social (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn).
