Leads and sales, that is what every marketer wants, and of course, you cannot generate leads nor sales without traffic. However, numbers can be misleading. Even if you get a lot of traffic from, let’s say Facebook, most of those leads may not be relevant for your business. In essence, it doesn’t matter how many visitors you attract from social networks if none of them are in your target demographic. As Steve Olenski, senior content strategist at Responsys Oracle puts it, “not all qualified leads are created equal”.
Are You Getting the Right Type of Traffic?
Getting the wrong kind of traffic is probably the single biggest reason your high traffic site is not converting. The problem is – many marketers think that they are targeting one audience, when they are in fact, targeting a very different one. In order to understand how people can make this mistake, let’s look at a specific example. Noemi Tasarra-Twigg runs the digital marketing agency, Disruptive Marketing, and in October 2013, they put out a blog post titled “6 Killer PPC Branding Tactics Even Freddy Krueger Loves’, and overnight, their traffic skyrocketed.
The post drove more organic traffic to their site than their homepage; however, even after more than two years the post did not produce a single conversion. While the post turned up on the first page on Google, it wasn’t when people searched for “PPC” or “PPC Branding” – it showed up when people typed in “Freddy Krueger”.
What are you Exactly Offering to the Customers?
It is time to abandon your post-and-sell strategy, and focus on what your target audience talks about on social media instead. According to a Mention study, more than 75% of all brand conversions on Facebook and Twitter came from people looking for information, advice or other help from users. Most of those people were not looking to buy directly, but they still end up learning about a brand and making a purchase down the line. As Google research clearly shows, social media platforms drive customer awareness, and necessarily direct purchasing habits. Maybe you should consider hiring a professional SEO consulting agency to do some social monitoring and find out what are your clients talking about.
With that insight, you can start joining meaningful conversations and offering help for all of the pain points the users are experiencing. The results could pay off big, because if you amass a large following on a social media network, your sales will start increasing.
Your Interface Might be Too Complicated
The simpler it is to click “Buy”, the more often it will happen. Customers these days are often impatient and harder to please than ever; according to KISSmetrics, over 40% of them will jump ship only after three seconds. I would imagine that the drop rate is well 50% if your site is loading 10 seconds in. In most cases, poor navigation is responsible for the lack of conversions. If it is not instantly obvious to the users where they are supposed to go on the website, chances are, they probably will not hang around to figure it out.
A broken site is perhaps the worst reason to lose sales, so have test-run through your site. You could start the testing with a little bit of role-playing – imagine that you are your target consumer, click on your homepage, time yourself and count how many clicks it takes to make a purchase.
You Should Never Stop Testing Your Website
However, don’t just stop there; test everything, because you never know what your consumers are attracted to. While there is a general guideline for conversion optimization, it doesn’t mean that it will work for you. If you do not see the same sales boost with a video like most sites do, change your strategy and test a different option. Who knows, maybe your site is amongst 1% of sites that increase conversions with the inclusion of an image slider.
