If you’ve been tasked with running marketing campaigns, or have been running your own small business, you’ll know that successful conversions are at the core of everything you do.
You may have executed a range of marketing activities and sales campaigns to get your target audience to take a specific action. This action, also known as ‘conversion’, may take the form of a sale, enquiry about your product/service, request for more information, sign up for a demo or any other task that takes your prospect on the next logical step towards a sale.
Successful conversions generate revenue, immediately or eventually.
A great product/service and effective marketing efforts are the only ways to ensure successful conversions.
Here are the top 5 killer steps to take for better conversions.
1. Invest in Good Copy.
Clean, crisp copy is at the centre of every successful marketing campaign, be it online or off.
Many marketers are guilty of ignoring this fact, and settling for content that they believe is ‘good enough’.
Great copy grabs your audience’s attention, creates interest, invokes a desire for your offering and eventually prompts action (aka. conversion).
Some ways to create good copy are:
- Analyze your audience to see what they are interested in.
This can be done via the keywords that are searched for on Google Keyword Planner or in Google Search Bar. Getting an idea of what your audience is interested in will help to catch their attention better.
- Edit, Edit, Edit!
Mistakes in your copy can cause major problems and can make your work appear unprofessional. Always proofread your work to make sure there’s no spelling mistakes and the grammar is tight.
- Write helpful tips into your content that resonate with your audience and solves their problem.
Content should help your audience with problems they’re having in their everyday life. This goes a long way to improving your conversion rate.
- Add a strong call to action to your peace and ask them a question at the bottom of any articles you write.
A question that ties in with your piece of content helps your audience to engage better with you.
- Use Copyscape.com or other duplicate content checkers to help reduce the risk of duplicated content.
People want to read original content, not content they’ve seen multiple times. It also helps to reduce damage to your website ranking having duplicate content on your website.
If you’re not used to writing your own marketing content, invest in a good copywriter to ensure you get your messaging on point. Ignore this step at your peril.
2. Focus on Your Target Audience.
Ask most marketers whom they are aiming a specific campaign at, and you’ll be surprised at the number of them who give vague answers such as “everyone”.
These ‘marketers’, take a shotgun approach with their marketing efforts. They execute a campaign and pray that something positive will come out of it.
Having a crystal-clear idea of your target audience helps you ascertain what messaging to use, how to package your content, which channels to utilize and what results to expect (or aim for).
In short, your marketing efforts will be executed with pinpoint accuracy.
The result – targeted campaigns, minimal waste and increased conversions.
Some ways to narrow down your target audience is to use audience segmentation. This can be done by narrowing down key categories which include:
- Psychographics
- Behaviours
- Geographic Locations
- Demographics
Place these into a table and add the traits underneath each category that your target audience would have.
Once the traits are worked out, you can then narrow your audience down further.
As you can see narrowing your audience down can help greatly in determining who you should be targeting for successful conversions.
3. Set Clear Objectives.
Every marketing campaign must have 1 or 2 clear objectives.
Try to achieve everything and chances are, you’ll fail on all fronts.
Focusing on one or two goals helps you allocate your resources to maximize results. Also, when you’re clear on your goal, you will know what metrics to track (i.e. website visits, social media engagement, email signups etc.).
When you know where you’re heading, it’s easy to track the results of every one of your marketing activities and take corrective action along the way.
E.g. If your goal is email signups and you’ve found that Facebook advertising brought in more results than Google AdWords, you can cut back your spending on the latter and focus your resources on the former for maximum conversion.
However, if you were focusing on a plethora of goals such as impressions, social media engagement, website visits, emails signups etc., you wouldn’t know what to do with your findings.
To set real objectives to work for, think of:
- What you hope to achieve from you marketing efforts;
- What timeframe you’re hoping to achieve it in (be realistic);
- What budget you’ve got to work with for your marketing efforts;
- What metrics you need to track in order to see results.
Having a final objective plan is key to targeting your marketing efforts accordingly for successful returns.
4. Test Everything.
Gone are the days when you run an advertisement on TV or radio and pray that you target audience responds. Today, with online marketing forming an integral part of your marketing efforts, you have plenty of data to help you make decisions.
Using small investments, you can test every element of your marketing strategies.
Concepts such as A/B Testing help you test variations of copy and visuals to identify which combinations give the best results.
Continuous testing also helps you identify which parts of your website are helping in the conversion process and which are hindering it. Use tools such as Google Analytics and various social media analytics to track how your target audience is responding.
With the amount of data and tracking tools available, blindly sinking resources in big marketing efforts is foolish!
5. Leverage Satisfied Customers.
Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising. Prospects are more likely to turn to you if their friend or other satisfied customers raved about your product/service.
Use social media to spread the good feedback you get from satisfied customers. You may even create awesome video content around them. Usually, delighted customers will be more than happy to help you.
Feature customer testimonials as an essential part of your content strategy to shoot conversions through the roof.
Other ways to improve word of mouth advertising could be:
- Ensure your staff and employees offer great customer service in your store or even online.
- Give away promotional items for free or products for discounted prices for first time shoppers.
- Offer quick delivery and make sure the order is shipped the same day.
- Follow up with your customer after the sale to make sure they’re satisfied if they purchased online.
While small, it’s the little things that help to boost your marketing efforts to transform customers into profitable conversions.
Conclusion
The above steps, in isolation or together, have helped many businesses improve their marketing efforts, resulting in an increase in conversions.
And remember, most marketing efforts cost a lot of money. Thus, the better your conversion rate, the more value you get for your marketing investments.
If you find you’re struggling, don’t be afraid to reach out to a digital marketing agency for help. Marketing agencies can help to analyze your current marketing plan and work out the best options for your needs.
What steps have you taken to improve your marketing efforts to improve conversions?
About The Author
This is a guest post by Bill Sheikh, founder of U-Thrive Marketing – one of the premier online marketing and website development firms in Oklahoma.