Getting traffic to your site is only the start of the journey. Getting visitors to convert is another matter entirely.
So should you expect visitors to want to partner with you or buy your products and services on the first visit? Put that way it does sound a little unrealistic, doesn’t it? Often the first visit to a website is part of a research journey. Your visitors are looking around and deciding what they need, and your website, because you have a great marketing strategy, showed up in search results and so they visited it… but are you left asking “Why didn’t they convert?” on that first visit, and if so is that realistically the goal that you should be focused on achieving?
To answer the question of “Why didn’t they convert?” there are several reasons why a visitor might well be very interested in your products or services but did not convert on that first visit:
- Because they may have not yet decided to commit and are looking for more information, your site is providing this for them
- They are in the first phase of research so don’t fully understand which product or service they need
- The timing is not yet quite right, they may need to discuss options with their teams, board etc.
- They may want to independently review your brand before they approach you
- You offer a different approach to your competitors and they want to compare them
- They may not need your services right away and so are looking for a provider when they are ready
They may not make these decisions for a few hours, days or weeks. The buying process can be very complex, involving research, gaining trust through reviews, choosing the best option, talking things over with others as well as making sure the funding is in place to go ahead.
The question therefore perhaps shouldn’t be, “how can I get the visitor to convert today?”, but “how can I get the visitor to return when they are ready to convert?” and as such how should we define what a conversion means for our business and what actions should we consider to be a conversion when we are reporting on our marketing and business success.
Defining Conversions
There is much more to a conversion that just a sale or a lead, defining the conversions that come from the different parts of the buying process gives us a better outline on what the visitor is showing us by the action they are taking, some examples of conversion definitions might be:
Turning visitors into Leads – success shown by providing you with their data, filling in a quote form or contact form of any kind
Turning prospects into Sales – making a purchase of any kind either online, in store or from a call
Visitors showing an Interest in your business – by returning to your site, signing up to a newsletter, registering for an event or spending time on your website as a whole
Visitors showing Intent – by following your social media pages, sharing videos, bookmarking pages, downloading information, following links of interest you have provided and visiting or sharing your case studies
Weighting Conversions
Weighting conversions importance to your business allows you to focus more on duplicating those actions, so if you are a business with a long purchase process, ie.tender processes or specified construction you are likely to have different priorities to businesses that have a fast turnover of products, ie the fashion industry.
Understanding that you want all of the conversions but that some are of greater importance than others allows you to break down the process and work on them as separate strategies.
By not targeting the whole process in one marketing campaign you can take a very different, targeted approach.
Marketing for Conversions
Having matched the importance of each conversion to your business processes you can then put in place different marketing strategies for each conversion and split your marketing budget accordingly, regularly reviewing to make sure that your internal teams are happy with the level of demand created in each area.
This will take you from one overall budget to several smaller budgets and activities and will decrease the need for a “one size fits all” approach targeted end of the line conversion. This then allows you to tailor your activity to your much more specific conversion and better allow you to target your audience at their relevant part of the purchase process.
This approach to targeting each of the desired actions with its own strategies will then allow you to better turn the volume up and down on them individually as needed to match any business seasonality and changes in ability to fulfill demand.
if you would like to talk to us about your conversion strategies and how you can better plan and better manage your digital marketing to feed your business with the conversions it needs, please do get in touch and our friendly team will be happy to offer our digital marketing support.