Too often people think that just because they got a prospect to “click thru” it means the person will take action when they get to the other side
For a long time we worked with small and medium sized business owners who believed traffic to a website equals leads. We like to think that business owners in more recent years have become more educated on the evolution of marketing to understand that traffic and conversions are not one in the same. Traffic is the number of people viewing your website while conversions is the number of people who take action on your site, such as clicking a call-to-action or downloading an offer.
However despite this clear distinction there is still the myth that if you increase traffic you will, in turn, increase conversions and in most cases, it’s just not the case.
Here’s what it really takes to engage someone on your website today…
#1:
They have to respond to a clearly stated value proposition
A value proposition is a must for any webpage today. In order to convert traffic, you must have something compelling to say that solves someone’s problem. If a value proposition doesn’t create an emotional trigger with your target buyer you will never gain a conversion, but likely achieve a bounce. When traffic hits your page, people need to immediately understand why they are there, what you are telling them and why it matters to them personally, especially if you are driving paid traffic. No point wasting your money on paid traffic if the content doesn’t strike a chord. The first step in your conversion strategy is to confirm your content and messaging aligns with your buyer.
#2:
Make the conversion matter: Value versus Offer
When you are driving people to a page in the hopes they will interact with it by either clicking a call-to-action or submitting a form to download something you better hope that offer is valuable to them. Conversions are great but the best kind of conversions are qualified conversions that are continuing to move through the pipeline. There are some great tools out there that can easily measure how fast or how far someone moves through the sales process without you having to do any work. HubSpot (p.s. we’re a certified partner agency!) for example tracks a persons’ every move from the time they land on your site to the time they stop interacting with it altogether. Many times we see that traffic is being driven to a page and that traffic is converting but then they are never coming back. This is a good indicator that the offer does not match the perceived value, therefore you must adjust your offer to ensure your conversion rate matters.
#3:
Understand the Conversion Formula
While testing conversion strategies is great, what you really need to understand is the conversion formula. The best people to explain this conversion formula is MECLABS. They’ve created a heuristic cheat sheet to help people understand what they’ve researched and call the Conversion Index Optimization Heuristic. MECLABS explains that “a heuristic isn’t an equation to solve, it’s more of a thought tool to help understand a process or method”.
For example, take a landing page you have created for a new download or offer you have, determine what the value proposition is on that page with the heuristic formula. Using this and other factors you will determine what the probability is of conversion on that offer/ landing page.
The bottom line: marketing is never about guessing. Use the data you have, put it into the conversion formula, adjust and continue testing to be successful. Ultimately, if your value proposition is wrong, your offer is wrong and your conversions are either wrong or just not there at all.
