Inbound Marketing Methodology: Step 2, Convert
For this installment of The Further Exciting Adventures of Inbound Marketing Methodology (the original post of which can be found here) , we’ll be covering what it takes to convert visitors to your website.
In our previous post, we detailed a number of strategies that you can use to attract potential customers by way of e-mail, social media, and similar techniques. But now that they’ve begun to pour onto your website in droves, what the heck do you do with them? You already know that you must turn these visitors into leads, but what techniques should you utilize?
Create Awesome Calls-to-Action
Your company’s success can be made or broken by the quality of your calls-to-action (or CTAs). Let’s face it — people have short attention spans. Even as you read this, your mind is starting to wander as you think about your spouse or your dog or what you want to eat for lunch. That’s why sometimes we might suddenly start talking about nonsensical things like dancing chicken nuggets or that monster in your closet. See … we got your attention, didn’t we?
The same is true when creating CTAs for your website. Your goal is to get your visitors’ attention so that they’ll stick around. Contact forms are old school, uninviting, and definitely not exciting. So forget about them. Instead, give a visitor something to do. For example, to learn more about what your company is all about, they need to click a button. Or, for visual stimulation, post a video that tells more about you or your product (and make sure the video is fun). Another great call-to-action is a free product that a visitor can download. Guide your visitors through the sales funnel and don’t forget to conduct A/B testing to determine what works best for your website.
Landing Pages Are Your Seductress
No, seduction isn’t a bad word. It’s actually a fantastic business concept. Attracting a potential customer is one thing; seducing them to really love both your website and whatever product or service you offer is quite another. If you succeed in seducing visitors once they’ve reached your website, you could very well have a customer for life.
For our purposes, seduction is done by creating exciting landing pages for every link on your main page and even deeper into your site. Have you ever clicked on a link that sounded exciting, only to be taken to a very bland new page or — egads! — a 404 Error page? Frustrating, isn’t it? Don’t cheat your potential customers. Don’t lure them in with a great marketing campaign and attractive homepage only to send them to an uninteresting mishmash of bad design and lack of ingenuity. For each landing page, ask yourself one simple question — if this was the first page you’d ever seen of your website, would you be impressed enough to stick around?
Your Forms Must Make Sense
One final note. The forms on each of your landing pages must make sense. They need to be aligned with the type of offer it is, whether it’s at the top, middle, or bottom of the sales funnel you’ve created. This is a mistake that many websites make when they’re first learning the process, and this misstep can lead to disaster. They’ll ask for too much information from the visitor up front and all sense of seduction suddenly ends as the visitor leaves the website entirely, never to return. If you insist on collecting information right away, limit it to name, e-mail address, and company name, if applicable. You can get more information later, once they’ve gone further down the sales funnel.
Conversion of potential customers can be a real minefield. But with some well-designed plans, you’ll close the deal in no time. We’ll follow up on that in our next blog. Stay tuned!
