Alex, the hypothetical CEO of a hypothetical company, spent a whole year developing the concept of his startup and another year fundraising and putting the right team together.
Another year was spent actually implementing the ideas. The developers spent night and day working in the office, excited about the major boom the product was surely about to cause.
Except it wasn’t. The product was as cool and promising as they had initially planned, but the potential customers remained indifferent.
Sounds familiar? Ever felt like Alex?
#wetoo
Time to open up the big secret. Turns out there is a very specific reason why your leads are not converting into sales:
Your Online Marketing Strategy is Wrong.
It’s understandable if you go, like, “No way! I have a magnificent team of marketing professionals working on our strategy!”
We all hate when our hard work is undervalued and criticized.
The thing is our company went through the same, and I know exactly how you feel. So, how about we go through the list of things that might have gone wrong and discuss how we can fix them and make your leads convert?
Your Target Audience
The target audience of your business is the center of the universe your business goals should revolve around.
In order to address your possible buyers in an efficient way and convert more leads, you need to identify your exact target audience first. So, if you have identified your target wrongly or not precisely enough, that will cost you plenty of conversions.
Identifying your target audience might seem like the easiest and most intuitive task, but truth is, it’s not. It can be much trickier than you think, especially when your product is something complex and multilayered.
So make sure you take advantage of every tool — from online polls and surveys to deep market research, from brainstorming with your employees to studying the target markets of your competitors.
This article should help you in the important task of defining your target market.
The Needs of Your Target Audience
Once you know who your potential buyers are, your next step toward lead conversion is to define their needs. You need to start walking in their shoes, so to speak.
Try to brainstorm with your team as well as gather insights from your target audience regarding the problems they face in your business category and the potential benefits your product could offer them.
When you have a list of the problems of your potential buyers and the respective solutions your business offers, make sure to build your business marketing strategy around that list. That will help your brand voice address your target market and its needs more efficiently which in turn will boost conversions.
Your Website Texts
Your company’s website is at the front line of the conversion war. This is where you are in full control of how you present your product, what you show and what you hide. Wherever your potential buyers hear/see/find information about your company they are eventually somehow either redirected to your website or find it themselves.
And here it comes — One of the biggest issues most starting businesses face is their websites’ texts.
Now you might object that everything the product is and does is properly discussed on the page, but that’s exactly what’s wrong with your website copy.
When it comes to your website copies, no matter if you’re considering the home page or a specific feature-related page, the “Too much information is no information” principle is at work.
Truth is, your users are not willing to spend their time reading pages upon pages of information just to figure out whether they need your product. You just can’t write a novella and then hope someone will appreciate your writing talent more than his or her own precious time.
You don’t need to include literally everything on your webpage. There’s no real advantage in creating complex and hard-to-digest texts for your products. Instead, I suggest you go the simple way:
- Have a list of your buyers’ problems. Address them.
- Be straightforward. If you wanna say that your day cream removes wrinkles, just go ahead and say so. Don’t tell the users that the “majestic and magnificent cream you offer is the first in the world complex face treatment that removes the undesirable wrinkles from your face and brings youth and a flowerish scent to your face.”
- Be direct. Save the brain calories of your website visitors. They are sure to appreciate it.
Your Website Content
Useful and relevant information is the best bait these days. Offering valuable information to your users in the form of awesome website content (articles, videos, visuals, etc.) about topics directly or indirectly related to your business is a great way to attract users and eventually convert them.
As for the content itself, make sure to invest a lot of effort in planning the right content strategy.
My suggestion is to carry out a thorough deep research of the field and create a backlog of all the topics as well as content types and forms that are relevant to your business and so, worth covering.
The stages of developing the content marketing strategy itself are listed in this article on how to scale your content marketing.
Your Website Design
Another possible problem might be your website design and architecture. You might be attracted to complicated and artsy design principles but most often that’s not really what your user is looking for.
Users value simplicity and ease of navigation. This means that your website’s design should absolutely be an important component of your lead conversion formula.
Your site’s design, just like its text, needs to be simplified as much as possible. You need to make it easy for the users to find the answer to whatever question they might have. Keep in mind that the patience of average users only lasts three clicks. If they can’t find what they were looking for in three clicks, chances that your website will be dropped are really high.
Of course, it’s not just about the three click rule; there are specific UI/UX rules and guides your website design should follow, such as placing your call to action button in a visible and eye-catching place, for example. Check out these 10 design requirements for an effective business website to learn more.
Constant Tests
One thing to keep in mind is that nothing ever stays the same, so neither should your product, your website or your marketing strategy. The international market changes, practices and tendencies evolve and so to stay competent in the market you gotta keep adjusting your strategies to the newer tendencies.
This basically means that you gotta keep working, testing and improving your strategy, even after reaching the initially planned conversion rate and/or number of customers. Adapt A/B testing practices and if a great idea doesn’t work out, just try to fix your mistakes or switch to something else with no regrets.
Constantly give your users new content to engage with. Come up with fresh ideas and test them out to choose which ones to integrate into your marketing strategy.
Plus, your promotion doesn’t start and end on your website. There’s so much more to business promotion, from using social media to joining business communities. These 10 tips for small business owners might give you some cool ideas regarding your future marketing endeavors.