A Quick Guide to Create a Conversion Strategy
Don’t let the word conversions scare you into thinking we’re about to dive into some difficult math equations! This blog post is actually here to help you improve your conversion strategy.
It’s important to track marketing conversions because they show you how successful your business actually is. If you’re not making sales or building relationships with your consumers, is your business even successful? Converting a consumer into a paying customer can be easily done, if you know how to do it.
The following steps will help you get through the dark and grey areas of marketing conversions.
If your business isn’t solely online, also read our blog post on Steps to Tracking Offline Conversions.
Step 1: Determine your company’s goals
The first step is to focus on what you’re going to measure, otherwise, your goals will not be attainable. Too often, companies set goals without a specific strategy or benchmark to keep track of their progress.
Identify key performance indicators, or KPIs, to determine what success will look like for your conversions. The KPIs are the individual factors that influence your overarching goal. If your goal is to grow site traffic by 30 percent this year, your KPIs will include traffic sources, social shares, bounce rates, and so on. Defining what your company’s success will look like is the foundation for improving your conversion strategy.
Step 2: Create a call-to-action plan
You can’t convert leads without a proper CTA to entice consumers to do so. A call-to-action is the button or link you promote on your content to encourage consumers to engage with you further. CTAs prompt the reader to take action, and they show them the next steps in their buyer’s journey. Don’t neglect your call-to-action plan because it can be one of the main reasons you’re not converting leads.
Your CTA may be as simple as an easy-to-find button, or a sign-up form at the end of a blog post. Either way, CTAs are the most crucial components of your conversion strategy.
Step 3: Lead score your traffic
The fact of the matter is, not all traffic is created equal. You know how much traffic it will take to reach your goals, and what your conversion ratio against your closing percentage is… But, you still don’t know how you get the right kind of traffic to maintain your baseline percentages. Lead scoring your traffic will give you clarity on how to do this.
In order to get the right kind of traffic, you have to understand who your ideal customer is and what they look like. You want to identify your customers and put names to them by creating buyer personas.
Once you’ve created a detailed buyer persona, you will be able to easily understand their behavior.
For example: Business Bob vs. Suzy Homeowner
Most of the time the visitors coming to your site have different purposes. Even if you only sell one product (hand soap, for example) your audience will have different needs for that one product. Business Bob might be looking at soap for large-scale, corporate stock; whereas Suzy Homeowner wants it to be safe for the kids and have an easy-access pump.
You need to know everything you can about the individual personas and their needs in order to market directly to them.
Create at least three buyer personas and study them in order to see how you can help them. Keep in mind, you can’t talk to Business Bob the same way you talk to Suzy Homeowner. The priorities of each are different and therefore the message to them will be completely different.
By now, you understand your business goals and who your ideal customer is. But, you still need to know who you’re not going after. You never want to waste your time and money targeting people who would not be a good fit for your business.
These are called negative personas and should act as a filtering system for incoming leads that do not fit your ideal customer profile.
There may be a number of reasons they aren’t a good fit – maybe they don’t have the budget needed for your services, so why would they invest in what you offer?
Having these traits in mind will help you become more efficient in bringing in quality leads. Simply put: if they don’t fit, don’t waste your time.
Step 4: Fine-tune your strategy to your business
Your new conversion strategy might take some time and practice to perfect. As you get to know your audience more, these should also reflect your brand identity. If you followed the first three steps, you should have a clear idea of where your conversion strategy is headed.
Consider the next few months an experimental phase in your company’s growth. Play around with different KPIs, metrics, CTAs, and so on. Even ask for input from other departments like your sales team. You might also try A/B testing, where you offer multiple versions of a webpage to see which one performs best.
As you study what works and what doesn’t, you will be able to perfect your overall strategy and convert your leads.
Step 6: Develop your strategy further
Developing your strategy can seem complex, but by now you’ve already developed most of it, anyway! There are additional methods to keep in mind to make your conversion strategy even better.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This is a broad term that is basically the delivery method of your messaging. SEM includes paid advertising on search engines and on social media platforms.
User Experience (UX) Audit
Perform an audit to evaluate your website and how people interact with it. The purpose of a user experience audit is to get the site to optimally convert your traffic to leads. The goal of any marketing effort is to increase your conversion percentage. If you can both drive new traffic from search engine marketing and get the site to convert on a higher level, then you are a lot closer to reaching your goals.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is where you drive qualified, relevant traffic to your site through an inbound methodology.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is a necessary step in making sure your website is ranking where it needs to be and your organic traffic is growing month-over-month.
Ultimately, these additional tactics combined will successfully help you stimulate leads to conversions.
Step 7: Review your performance
After some time, six months to a year, step back and perform an in-depth analysis of your numbers (so maybe you are doing some math after all…). So far, you’ve developed a strong marketing conversions strategy using the steps above. But keep in mind you should never be too proud to re-examine your conversion strategy!
As marketers, we are scientists. We have to look at all the data in front of us. If your experiment didn’t perform how you expected, make a change and see if you have improved results. You need to test your tactics, understand mistakes, and have a plan for change. Take risks in order to see a positive change (but, of course, minimize the risk).
Use this post as a guide to help you if your business is not converting leads. For more information or guidance with any of the steps above, schedule a free strategy session with one of our marketing masterminds. Click the button below to get started!
