Convert more traffic into leads
This topic is one of the most important yet most overlooked opportunities with the potential to completely transform the growth of your business.   It is also the most cost efficient, profitable and simplest of marketing strategies.
Business owners spend tens of thousands per year driving traffic to their site but only a fraction of the cost or time working out how to convert more traffic into leads.  It is very important that we clarify from the start, that more traffic does not equal more customers, often it means more cost and lower ROI.
Your first step should focus on implementing a high conversion, low cost strategy, and once you achieve this then focus on increasing relevant traffic volume.  Your cost now becomes focused on ROI with $1 in and $5 out; and as long as you keep a profitable ratio of cost and revenue you can continue increasing traffic until this ratio starts to decrease again. Without more leads you do not have an opportunity to make more sales.
More Leads = More Sales.  
Creating a high conversion strategy to suit your business often requires stepping out of your comfort zone with some lateral thinking skills to capture people’s attention.  It  also requires some considerable effort to create new content and creative promotional offers to build a large database of leads.   Often the level of effort you are willing to go to create an irresistible offer can determine the level of success you will experience in your website conversion strategy. Your conversion strategy also includes more than just creative offers and great content. It requires building a website that evokes the right emotion through building a brand and culture conveying who you are as a business.   Images, colours and layout are your tools to convey an instant impression and emotion that captures the attention of your audience.  So let’s start your first steps to creating a powerful conversion strategy.

It all starts with research?
Below are the key questions that need to be asked in order to start realising you need to make some drastic changes to your website conversion strategy.  Often the biggest challenge is accepting that you need more than just a contact us or an online quote form.

• Who are your online and offline competitors?
• What are your competitors offering?
• What is better or worse about your competitors websites?
• How do others rate your website compared to your competitors websites?

Once you have obtained more insight from the answers to the above questions it is time to begin planning your conversion strategy.
Which type of strategy depends on a number factors starting with the type of business and industry you are in.   Your business may fit into one or multiple criteria below which will determine your approach.
[togglegroup][toggle title=”Home Services”] This audience often procrastinates their decision or could be planning for a specific date for any reason. Remarketing banners with a 30 to 60 day cookie will enable you to build your brand to this audience who is more likely to shop based on price. It’s also your opportunity to make your brand familiar and continue to build value while they compare or perform repeats searches over the next few days or weeks after first clicking on your website.
If your audience is a one off purchase ( example: emergency plumber, hotwater system, pest control. ) then your remarketing strategy should be highly frequent and combined with all three types of remarketing, ( site, search and cross remarketing strategies ). If your home service enables regular servicing ( example: lawn mowing, cleaning, ironing service ) then remarketing will help to build a long term relationship and increase the frequency of your service to this audience. Remember most people forget to reorder when it comes to a repeat purchase product or service. If Remarketing increases the re-purchase rate by 10% for all your clients, this could mean tens of thousands per year in additional profit. Your conversion strategy should also include an innovative approach to provide instant online quotes. Consider a live chat on your website with a mobile app like www.zopim.com.
With home services you may find most people will want to make a phone call instead filling out an online form, so be sure to emphasis your phone number in two highly visible locations. One in the top right hand side of your website and another just above the scroll of most computer screens. With your online quote or enquiry form, ensure it is visible on every page and consider adding the following statement:  “Quick replies in 10 minutes” or “Instant quote sent by text message”.  The reason most people do not want to fill out an online form is they do not want to wait 24 hrs for a reply or they are not sure they want to talk to someone just yet.
This audience is often hard to target and requires an effective online search strategy. Long term SEO is the wise investment however for short term ROI, paid search with Google AdWords, Bing and Yahoo ad platforms is ideal. For highly competitive industries, Yahoo and Bing can generate less traffic volume but at a much more affordable cost per click.
You may also consider multiple micro-sites that are highly focused on conversion, however it is important to ensure all your websites are highly optimised for mobile devices.  We are finding over 25% of searches are now done with mobile devices which also enables opportunities like proximity bidding and integrations with Google maps click to navigate buttons, Google offers, reviews and social extensions with Google+ local pages.
When it comes to home services we highly recommend utilising Google’s new Offers extension which enables users to download and print an offer that can be redeemable based on conditions that you set.   Consider an offer like “Free X with every X voucher redeemable at any time in the future, offer ends X”.   Another offer might say, “Download our X% off voucher before X date, redeemable at any time in the future”.   By doing this you are building a database that you would otherwise not be able to acquire, for people who are not quote ready to contact you to make a buying decision.  With regular emails you can now ensure this person will contact you and not your competitors when they are ready to make a buying decision.
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[togglegroup][toggle title=”Business to Business”] This audience is a much easier target to locate and market to thanks to the large range of data sources available.
There are also mutliple offline marketing activities you can apply to target a specific business type, categories or individual.
One of the few social media tools I highly recommend for strategic marketing is Linkedin.  There is the ability to filter based on job roles, titles and with a premium account target those working for companies with x amount of employees.  Keep in mind that the business owner although many are listed, may not be your target person within an organisation.  The key is to identify who makes the purchasing decisions or has a large influence on purchasing decisions.  If you are a paper shredding company then the decision here might be an administration or financial officer who deals with paperwork or sensitive information that needs to be disposed off securely.   Once you start connecting with people on Linkedin it is important not to sell to early, in fact if you combine your soft approach with remarketing you may not need to sell at all.  Imagine connecting with the CFO of a large national organisation and having that person check out your website before connecting and then having them be followed by your brand through remarketing banners.   We find over 70% of people will check out your website before considering to accept your invitation to connect.   You are now able to build a connection with your target audience and when you call asking directly for that person you will have stimulated curiosity and a very high chance of being put through to position your offer or appointment.
Other strategies to consider for Business to Business conversion strategies includes implementing a referral based alliance with other non-competitive business owners who are targeting the same type of clients.  If two or more businesses are spending $2000 per month targeting the same audience it only makes sense to join forces and leverage your total marketing power as a group.   Manual networking arrangements is good however also rarely result in consistent referral activity.  At Kick Media we have leverage and automated the entire process through a technique called cross remarketing.   This involves exchanging remarketing codes on all your referral partner websites and developing a creative banner strategy to recommend and endorse each other.   Imagine your brand being promoted to the exit traffic of 5 websites with an online banner  endorsing you by the business website they have just previously visited or transacted with.  Cross remarketing is the future of marketing especially as online cost per click for Paid Search continues to increase.
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Other tailored marketing tactics can be applied to any of the below business industries

• Industrial / Trade Services
• Retail
• Professional services
• Low price products
• High price products
• High consideration products or services
• Repeat purchase products or services
• Once off product or service purchases
• Subscription based products or services
• Small, medium or corporate level products and services

The next step is understanding the 5 critical factors why most businesses fail when it comes to executing a profitable marketing strategy?
Critical factor #1
97% of people will not contact you the first time they visit your website.
Critical factor #2
Most people are not ready to make a buying decision on the first product they see or service they contact.
Critical factor #3
Most people visit your website multiple times before they contact you.
Critical factor #4
Most people lose motivation to buy anything if not convinced to do so.
Critical factor #5
You will never be able to guess what people really want.
 
Once you start to grasp the above concepts you can then start thinking about how our marketing technologies and tactics can work to solve al the above Critical Factors in making your business a success.
Make an appointment with one of our marketing consultants today to learn how we can provide a solution to all 5 critical factors and steer you in the direction of converting more traffic into leads.