Any business that has an online presence has a single, overarching goal for everything that happens on their website. Every great piece of content, every decision made about design, and every promotion of their site is geared to convert visitors to the site into customers. Visiting your website is often the first interaction potential customers have with your brand. As such, hitting them over the head with a sales pitch isn’t the best way to turn them into customers. Instead, think about satisfying the needs that led them to your site in the first place. This is a better way to give them the right impression of your brand and make them interested in giving their business to you.
The key to making this kind of conversion is summed up in the principles of inbound marketing. With inbound marketing, it’s easy to deliver on your website visitors’ needs and provide a positive experience on your site. This practice is good for your business. In fact, it’s one of the best ways to convert them into paying customers. These tips will help you get it right.
Embrace Inbound Marketing
There are three steps in inbound marketing, and they all work together to increase the value of your site to customers:
Attract
The first step is to attract them. As the name suggests, attracting potential customers means getting them to visit your site in the first place. Note that you don’t want to simply attract anyone to your site who happens to be clicking around on the internet. You want to attract the visitors who are most likely to want to become customers of your brand.
Doing this requires careful content creation. Your content should be relevant to your business and the pain points you have identified for your customers. It should be voiced in a way that resonates with the market you have identified. SEO strategies should be carefully crafted to emphasize the most relevant keywords. Creating ads for your site and using social media to promote your content are also part of this process.
Engage
Engaging is the second step. It involves using conversation to interact with site visitors and bring them in closer to your brand. This can be through email, live chats, messaging apps, and even bots. Throughout this engagement, be sure to collect information from your visitors. Next, use this information to personalize your marketing efforts. For example, you may wish to send an email promotion to a specific group of site visitors for a product that matches their interests.
Delight
Delighting visitors is the final step of the process. It is an extension of engagement and collecting data from site visitors. The best way to delight visitors is to make sure they get the right information every time they visit your site. This can mean ensuring that conversations with potential customers are routed to the right department. It may involve having a robust and varied selection of content that addresses all of your market bases. Having content that is interesting and shareable is another way to delight visitors. It will also help attract new ones, starting the cycle again.
Refuse to Work in Silos
Everyone on your team is responsible for completing the attract-engage-delight cycle, not just your marketing team. Working in silos is the enemy of efficient conversion. Make sure your marketing, sales, services, and tech teams—in other words, every team in your business—are working together to make your inbound marketing efforts click.
The reason for this is that your customers need to have a great experience in every interaction and not just during their first visit to the site. If you effectively involve them in engagement, then they won’t be encountering just one team of your business. For this reason the messaging and commitment to conversions has to be part of your company’s culture, not a task for just one group of people.
Track Your Results
As with all kinds of marketing, knowledge is power. You need to know exactly which efforts are helping your progress through the attract-engage-delight processes and which are not, so you can adjust accordingly. This means creating careful campaigns with very targeted objectives. Know how you will track your results before the campaign even starts. For example, are you trying to increase traffic, hoping to boost time on the site, or working to get more email subscribers? Set a time frame for your campaign and track the numbers that are specific to the results that you want to achieve.
For some campaigns, the results you want to track will be how many site visitors make a purchase. However, even if that is your overarching goal, don’t make it the metric you use for every effort. Remember that you need to attract, engage, and delight visitors with your content. This doesn’t always mean getting them to make a purchase on their first visit. Keeping them on the site or turning them into repeat visitors by meeting their needs is the best way to build conversions and turn those conversions into repeat customers instead of one-time buyers.
Make Pennington Creative part of your plan to convert site visitors into customers. Our experienced team of copywriters and inbound marketing specialists can provide onsite services, blog copy, social media and email marketing, graphic design, and the rest of the content you need to close the deal. We work to understand your business’ needs. We’ll create marketing solutions that are the right fit for your brand and your industry. We work as though we are your dedicated marketing department, but we save you the stress of managing one. Talk to our content marketing team in Tucson today about your needs, and find out how we can help you attract customers and grow your brand.