Online conversions or traffic, what’s of greater importance? If 50k people from a dog grooming website, and another 500 from an established marketing site land on your website, which of the traffic sources will deliver more sales?
Unless you’re specifically going after page views, conversions should be given the priority. You get conversions when you put a relevant offer in front of targeted traffic. You start by conducting your research and analysing the want or need of potential customers.
So what’s the best way to get in front of your target audience online?
If you are looking to get more conversions, you must first define your potential customers. You should know what makes them tick, what they are looking for, and their challenges.
If your goal is to reach “everyone” or “people interested in my offer,” your chance of boosting conversions diminishes significantly.
Why it’s important to define your potential customers
If you define…
- Who they are, getting them becomes easy (the key phrases they type into Google, the Web pages they frequent, their favourite blogs, etc.);
- The way they define your services, you can craft your website copy to address the existing conversation in their mind (extremely crucial!);
- The way they compare and pick products in your niche, you know how to optimise your website content;
- Their wants, you can build your value proposition around that, and everything can be super-relevant to them;
- What doesn’t interest them, you can ensure you don’t put them on your website;
- How your website improves their life, you know the benefits to sell to them.
Relevancy is key – if you present the right offer the right way, and if it aligns with their thinking, you’ve just made a sale there.
However, if you are busy targeting “everybody,” that’s a great way to stack the odds against yourself.
If there’s no data to work with, begin with assumptions
If you are yet to gain customers, you are acting based on educated guesses and assumptions based on your experience.
Ideally, if you want to properly define your potential customer, you need to define their needs, sex, age, and location. The data you need to collect will depend on your business’s nature – whether it’s B2C or B2B.
However, this doesn’t seem like the most helpful approach. When it comes to online businesses, the location isn’t so important. Age is now subjective – there are as many 50-year-old tech enthusiasts behaving like 20-year-olds, and we have many 30 years olds still living with mum and dad. You want to put lifestyle data ahead of demographic data.
The questions you want answers to are:
- Who your potential customers? What’s their current situation?
- What’s their pain and want?
- Which of their needs need to be met?
In order to have a real case for your offer, you also need to consider the size of the market and their disposable income. The fact that you have a solution in hand doesn’t guarantee that you’ll smile to the bank.
Get people’s opinions
The facts are not within the confines of your office, so find a way to look for them outside. When people start complaining about poor sales, we usually ask them how many potential customers they’ve spoken to, and the answer is usually “None.”
After writing down your first customer profile, go after these people or businesses. Talk to them in their comfort zone and gather all the information you need.
What if your assumptions turn out to be wrong?
There are times when companies start with an assumption of what they think their potential customers want, and then they shake things up along the way once they learn a few things about the market. This is known as a pivot.
Many popular businesses have made drastic changes, from Groupon to PayPal.
Survey your existing customers
One of the best things you can do is to survey your paying customers. You want to be reading their minds to know how and why they make buying decisions.
You don’t have to survey every customer. Focus on the recent ones who can still remember their purchase process. If you start questioning people who made purchases months ago, they might not remember anything, and they might lie to you.
Our recommendation is that you ask them these questions (feel free to edit them to fit your situation):
- Who are you? Get their demographics. If you run a B2B business, let them state their industry and position in that business (and who calls the shots when it comes to business decisions).
- What purpose is your product serving? Here you want to know what problem the product is helping them solve. You might learn about some unintended uses.
- How has the product improved your life? What improvements have you noticed in your life? This way, you will know the benefits of your products, and you will be able to put it in their own words. If you receive glowing words from some, contact them for case studies or testimonials
- What excites you the most about our product? Once they tell you the most exciting thing about your product, make sure you push it hard in your copy.
- Did you look at other alternatives before joining? If yes, name them. You want to know your direct competitors. Next, you might want to do a write-up comparing your product to your competitors’
- What convinced you to purchase our product? You want to know the advantages you have over your competition and how you can strengthen them.
- What were your hesitations and doubts before purchasing? Once they share them with you, try to fix them as soon as you can.
- Which of your questions are still unanswered? About 50% of sales are lost because there’s no sufficient information. You will be able to know the missing answers your customers want to know.
- Anything else? Here they might want to share some things you didn’t remember to ask.
- What other product would you buy from us (if we packaged and delivered an unrivaled one)? You will get ideas on new products that could be equally as profitable.
Things to note about the survey
Keep it as short as possible. More questions get fewer responses and answers. Try weeding out your questions after creating them.
Ensure you can make use of the information you collect. Avoid asking questions out of curiosity. After drafting your questions, go through them yourself. Make sure every question achieves a specific objective.
Keep things neutral. Stick to language that doesn’t instigate or insinuate anything. Put yourself in the shoes of the person taking the survey with a specific set of answers. Then try supplying a different set of answers, and see if the questions become harder or easier. Now make adjustments to the wording to keep things neutral.
Don’t include multiple choices
Make all your answers free-form instead of multiple choices. You want to afford customers as much freedom as possible.
Also, you should pay attention to the way they construct their words. On your website, you need to speak the language of your customers. Pay attention to the way they talk about the problem and the product.
Most times, I just copy specific answers from some surveys and use them to enhance a value proposition or some other sections of the website copy, and the result has been amazing.
Pressure and Reward
Always make sure you portray your surveys as “time-sensitive” when you send them out. You can say something like, “be sure to fill this within five days of receiving this survey,” and when they do, reward them with a gift. This way, you will get more responses and answers.
Here’s what Google Analytics can show you
If you have tracking and goals properly set up in Google Analytics, you can have access to some powerful insights.
Below you will find some helpful reports that reveal things such as the best converting traffic source. Focus more on high converting traffic sources.
If you are using guest blogging as your traffic strategy, then pay attention to the blogs that are sending the most quality traffic and strive to get more of your posts published on such blogs.
Custom report by Google Analytics can be extremely helpful. Below are some plug-n-play reports you can import into your Google Analytics just by clicking the links.
- Best converting traffic sources. Not all traffic will convert into sales and leads, but the ones that are converting, where are they coming from? Get the Report.
- Some of your content is outperforming others. Get a clear picture. Get the Content Efficiency Analysis Report.
- Most profitable keywords. Which of your keywords is bringing in the money? Try to get higher rankings for these keywords. Get the Keyword Analysis Report.
- Best performing landing pages. Which pages are performing well for their traffic, and do they convert? Get the Converting Landing Pages Report.
- Ecommerce report. If your website is eCommerce related, you want to know the best performing channels. This Google Analytics custom report reveals visit per source, as well as visit value and revenue data. Get the eCommerce Traffic Report.
Put your assumptions to test
Test, test, and test some more.
Everything you learn doesn’t hold much ground until you test. If you are not getting enough organic traffic, try running some PPC ads such as Google ads, to get some traffic for statistical confidence.
Try to conclude your assumption tests quickly; you don’t want to miss out on a potential sale because you’re waiting.
Conclusion
Remember, conversions take place when targeted traffic meets relevant offer. So your job as a marketer is to find the right sources traffic and to make sure your website is relevant for them. Relevancy leads to sales.
Use the findings from talking to people, surveys and analytics data to write the copy on your site and decide on the information architecture. Use it for your product development (and for deciding what to sell in the first place).
When you master finding your target audience online, they’ll look at the content and go “Hey, this is exactly what I’m looking for.” That’s how you’ll know you’ve nailed it.
Do you need help targeting your ideal online audience?
Get in touch with us today to discover how our Bright Owl marketing consultants can transform your business.
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We’re not even going to follow you up with constant emails and phone calls either. The worst outcome for you is that you get 30 minutes of free advice with a marketing expert.
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