The end goal of every business in this world is to get more customers, boost sales, and increase their profit. And that is why marketing and advertising teams exist – to engage the target audience and convert it into customers.
However, some marketers use outdated marketing models which no longer show results. Furthermore, a study by HubSpot revealed that many marketing teams struggle with conversions and that prospecting is the most difficult part of their job.
To fix this issue, your brand image and communication with your audience need to be stellar. No matter whether you are an established business or the new kid on the block, if you don’t aim for perfection, you will be wiped out by your competition sooner than expected.
Below are listed the strategies that will help you increase website conversions and sales. Read them carefully and jot down everything you find interesting – you never know when you may need it.
Know your audience
At the beginning of each marketing campaign, you need to learn all the details about your audience, that can be useful for your marketing goals. It is very simple – you have to research your prospective customers first in order for them to find your brand later.
That is why the first step of every campaign, especially when it comes to fairly new businesses, is to understand their audience. This allows marketers to send the right message to their audience and effectively engage them.
To start this process, try asking yourself the following questions:
Who is my average customer?
This will help you learn about the demographics (age, gender, education, location, etc.) and psychographics (attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria).
It is very important to find out as much as you can since this will help you communicate with your clients more effectively later in your campaign.
Where can I find them on social media?
Not everyone targeted will use the same social media platform. Take, for example, a teenager and a fifty-year-old. It is possible that you will find them on completely different social media websites. It is your job to find where they are on the web and then use that channel to communicate with them.
What are their pain points?
Your goal as a business may be to earn money, but your mission is to help your customers solve their problems. Finding out what bothers your audience is crucial, as it will help you create content that answers their questions and heals their pain points.
Once you have answered these questions and learned all you can about your prospective leads, the time has come for you to segment them into categories. In other words, you need to create different buyer personas based on the data you collected in your research.
Here are some questions that will help you create buyer personas:
– Why do they need your product or service?
– How are they going to use it?
– How can your product or service fit into their shopping habits?
This is only the first step, and it already seems too complex, right? We feel you. Answering all these questions will take time, but it will definitely help you get more email subscribers and boost your conversions in the long run.
Communicate through social media
We all know how important social media is for modern marketing. Due to so many people having social media accounts, using this marketing channel is a must if you want to reach out to wider audiences.
You can use social media to build a huge base of followers by regularly communicating with them on other businesses’ pages, through comments, and by posting engaging content. Of course, you can also run paid ads on social media – you can read about them later in the article.
Below, you can read some of the best tips for getting more conversions through social media.
Choose the right platform(s)
As mentioned above, not all platforms will get you conversions because different people spend time on different social media websites. Some of the social networks may not even get you conversions at all, which is perfectly fine.
For this reason, you have to discover the platform (or platforms) where your customers spend time. Once you focus on specific platforms, the next step is to customize your message for your audience, your brand, and of course, the network.
Try to avoid using business jargon on Facebook and Instagram or posting ridiculous memes on LinkedIn. In other words, you won’t create the same posts on Instagram and LinkedIn, will you?
Be active 24/7
Actively and constantly contributing to existing conversations on Facebook, for example, requires alertness and speed, but also skillfulness and knowledge. By contributing to conversations about your brand and engaging topics in your industry, you add value to your brand.
In addition, you should also consider sharing relevant content whenever you can. Of course, this doesn’t mean posting twenty useless posts a day. Instead, focus on quality and post/share the following content that is useful to your customers:
– whitepapers
– webinars
– blog posts (new or refreshed old blog posts)
– infographics
– tutorials
Use the right tools
Finally, there are some effective social media marketing tools that can give you the edge over your competition. Running a social media campaign without various tools is practically impossible, and these tools are being used by an increasing number of marketers.
These tools can help you create more relevant content, schedule your posts, measure the results of your campaign, and so on. Don’t hesitate to use them, because some of your competitors are already doing that.
Design a killer landing page
Finally, there comes a landing page. And unfortunately, if your landing page is not properly created, your previous efforts may have been in vain.
Landing pages increase conversions, generate leads and sales, and keep you in the loop when it comes to learning new things about your customers.
When it comes to creating a high-converting landing page, there are several elements that require special attention:
– headline
– design
– added visuals
Headline
A landing page headline can make or break your conversion rate. With an effective headline, you convey the right message and encourage your visitors to buy.
The best headline types you can use are: testimonial, cliffhanger, value proposition, and listicle.
– Testimonial
When a brand quotes someone else’s positive experience with them, this is simply irresistible for customers. Testimonials are a great risk-reversal because they boost the credibility of your brand by letting a third party praise your product or service.
– Cliffhanger
Cliffhangers are also very effective because they reveal just enough to grab the visitors’ attention but give the real deal only to those who click the CTA button.
– Value proposition
A value proposition offers something unique and highly desirable to your visitors as a part of your mission to help them solve their problems and improve their lives.
– Listicle
People simply love lists because they are easy to scan. So, whatever your offer is, you can create a headline which includes numbers and indicates a list that follows it.
Design
Humans are visual creatures, period. And since our vision is responsible for most of the decisions we make on a daily basis, your goal should be to use this and motivate your visitors to convert by creating a beautiful landing page.
To successfully design your landing page, try using WordPress themes that boost conversions and sales.
Also, pay attention to these elements:
– Color contrast
To make things easier for your visitors and encourage them to convert, your CTA button has to be clearly visible. That is why you need use contrasting colors to make your CTA stand out from the rest of the page.
– Simplicity
Even though visuals are incredibly important (read about this later in the article), nobody likes a landing page stuffed with images or videos. This distracts your visitors and turns them away, but also increases the webpage load time, both of which lead to loss of conversions.
– Logo
A landing page without a brand logo is like a road without a sign. The logo lets the visitors know where they are.
This doesn’t mean that you should place the logo in the center of your landing page, just make it easily noticeable.
– Formatting
Formatting your landing page is more important than you may think. You can have great elements, but without proper formatting, they won’t be nearly as effective.
To format your landing page, try to clearly lay out all its elements like the headline, images and videos, copy, and form.
Speaking of forms, take a look at these online form statistics to see how you can improve your conversion rate.
Visuals
Lastly, don’t forget to place high-quality images and videos on your landing page!
– Images
In general, high-converting landing pages are visually attractive and have great images. Your images should be high-quality, large, attention-grabbing, and relevant to your product or service.
– Videos
Each year, video content is getting more and more popular. Including a 30-seconds to 2-minutes sales pitch video is all you need to motivate people to convert.
The video should grab people’s attention, describe the concept in a clear and logical way, as well as contain the same elements as the landing page (headline, sub-headline, explanation, contact method, call to action, and so on).
Bonus tip – paid ads
All the strategies above take time, and time is sometimes a luxury you won’t have. Especially if you are a new business on the market, you need some quick ways to reach out to your target audience and convert them as soon as you can.
Enter PPC advertising.
Pay-per-click ads are super-effective for driving traffic to your website and increasing conversions and sales. For example, if you’re in the E-commerce industry and have a Volusion website, you may want to consider a Volution to BigCommerce migration, since BigCommerce has better PPC opportunities.
You can use various platforms to run paid ads:
– Google
You must have heard of Google ads. With the Google AdWords tool, you can create custom ads for your products or services, that will appear as a top result in relevant search queries.
To get the most out of Google ads and attract quality leads to your website, you need to target keywords and queries with a high conversion intent.
– Social media
Facebook and Instagram offer businesses great opportunities if they choose to promote themselves on these platforms. Running ads on these platforms will help you reach a wider audience because your posts appear in your users’ feeds.
With Facebook and Instagram ads, you can get a great ROI and quality leads if you target your audience properly and include effective calls to action.
When you use all these strategies, you will see your conversions and sales skyrocket. If you feel you don’t have the expertise needed to improve sales and conversion rates, you can always outsource internet marketing to experts.
Finally, it all boils down to this: if your marketing strategy is in the hands of experts, the process will take time, but it will be worth it in the end.
Author Bio: Dave Schneider is the founder of LessChurn, a churn reduction app. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world and has visited over 65 countries. In his spare time, he writes about SaaS and business at DaveSchneider.me.
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