This article isn’t pulling any punches. I’m putting my foot down with some simple facts and stating clearly that if a growth marketing strategy is not focused on improving either traffic or conversions — don’t do it. Period.
Sure, it can be tempting to dive in and try every ‘great’ idea that your team suggests; however, successful marketing professionals understand that you can achieve far more by working smarter than by working harder.
Office life is busy. We have more tools and tactics to choose from than ever before to achieve our revenue growth goals. This opens up many conversations from many different stakeholders on what they ‘think’ might work, or how they may ‘feel’ strongly about certain colours or content offers, (side note, seriously consider the value of that eBook before you write it).
Let’s be honest, some marketing ideas just don’t work
The good news is that it’s easy to spot bad ideas before they grow too big to be put back on the shelf. Here is the trick: ask your team if adopting this change to your company website will increase traffic (i.e. month-over-month website sessions) or increase the conversion rate on your forms, chatbots, or calls. If you can’t identify how this change will positively affect one of those fundamental aspects of online marketing, then don’t pursue it. Why invest your team’s time and energy into an idea than won’t help you achieve your revenue growth goal?
How to Increase Traffic to your Website
Perhaps the most pervasive myth about successful online marketing is that design is the most important aspect of your website. (It simply isn’t true). Consider if you spent weeks perfecting the colour palette for a landing page, and you do make it beautiful. But, then the basic on-page SEO (search engine optimization) strategy isn’t in place. There is no internal linking to connect this page as part of a greater topic cluster that has been reinforced across your website. The result would be that no one will ever see this page in the vast expanse of the internet, and all the effort to make it beautiful is lost. Ouch.
Alternatively, there is a school of thought that would recommend building that beautiful landing page and then sending paid traffic to it. In the short team, this avoids the need to develop and reinforce a keyword strategy; however, it means that the traffic part of the equation will cost you money — every month. Ouch, that hurts even more.
How to Increase Conversions on your Website
After doing the foundational SEO work, what if there was no thought about how contacts will convert on this page. Yikes. This is the second major aspect that your team needs to consider.
What we know works is reducing the length of your forms. Remove any unnecessary questions. Remove mandatory fields wherever possible. Don’t ask for things that make contacts uncomfortable (i.e. their budget).
Do you see where this is going? Your website needs to be considerate of the user. Don’t put up barriers to keep bad leads out, instead write thoughtful content that would only be searched for and found by the sales leads that you want. Then don’t force them to suffer through a long form, with mandatory sensitive questions about the problems their business is experiencing. These are real people, so be kind to them.
Let them pre-qualify themselves as a sales lead by asking the only question that matters: which one of your services are they interested in, followed by their email address. Serious sales leads will then understand an email address is necessary for you to send them the details of your services. It’s honest and transparent.
Here is the conversion formula for any website:
1. First visit form question: Tell me more about your services.
(Form submit button: send me the details)
2. Second visit form question: Tell us more about your needs.
(Forward these notes to the sales team)
How this works in HubSpot is to only show the second set of form questions to returning visitors. The most reliable way to do this is by using smart-content based on list membership (i.e. if the visitor has filled in the first form, then show them the second form).
People understand how the Internet works, and they are still willing to submit forms, or talk to a chat bot, but only if it isn’t a burden. The value add that your company provides could be as simple as a joke told by a chatbot.
Sample Chatbot welcome message: “Do you want to hear a joke?”
- Followed by a (non-offensive) industry related joke.
- Then transition the chatbot conversation to, “I should get back to work now, did you have a question?”
- Collect name, service inquiry, and their email.
I would totally chat with this bot. She sounds human. If you want to learn more about increasing traffic and conversions, this article goes into more depth about Growth-Driven Design.
At Flawless, we’re not your agency – we’re your partner. If you are looking for proven techniques to improve your business profitability, our team has worked with over 70 B2B companies across different industries and we can help boost your business results online.
Want to know more? Just ask.
