Lets face it we all want sales. Social media is a magnificent vehicle to build relationships with your customers, engage and connect with them – with the goal of creating a long term relationship - their part is to purchase your products and services and your part is to provide for them the products and services they need and those things that will solve their problems.

Everything you do to market your product and or services - is ultimately to drive people to your website and have them convert to a buying customer that comes back many times. This can also be said of the visitor who comes to your bricks and mortar business. Leveraging your website or social networking community to drive sales - not only via your website but also to your retail store is the goal for most.

One of the long standing difficulties and reasons for skeptics in the digital world - is the lack of success with attaining those sales conversions. Finding the right ways to connect with your target market as well as understanding the strategy - behind search words and phrases -will you get that customer to your site - so you can show them you have what they need.  When that visitor gets to your site - via the high ranking - that you have attained through strategic and well planned search word and phrases via Google – you need to keep them on your site. You want to excite them so that they want to stay – and be able to easily and quickly, show them that you have what they need or are looking for. 

I came across this excellent article that speaks to 2 ways to do that. DMN News posted an article that provides 2 ways, that you can ensure you make those conversions of visitors to your site - into customers that purchase and return to purchase regularly. Author Pam Foster explains what conversion means and lets you know in a quick and simple read - that you can have the highest ranking in the world and send visitors to your site – BUT- if you are not converting them into a buying customer then all your search efforts are for not.

STRATEGY is always the name of the game in all of the digital marketing and advertsing planning. The end result is always the sale – getting that person to convert from a visitor to a paying customer. So what is your strategy going to be in 2010 – 2011?

Best Nicole

What exactly is a Web site conversion, and why does clear, customer-focused Web content make such a difference?

First, a definition of web conversions:

Let’s say target prospects arrive at your Web site via a Google search result, an email or other means of driving traffic. If they’re delighted with your site and they find exactly what they’re looking for, they’ll take the next step to make a purchase, subscribe to your service, download a free trial, become a qualified sales lead, etc.

Through these actions, they are converting from a prospect to an active customer in some way.

The goal of most business Web sites is to convert as many site visitors as possible into paying customers and ideally improve conversion rates over time.

Now for the second part of the question: Why does clear, customer-focused web content make such a difference regarding conversions?

Many companies know it’s critical to use keywords in their content to drive great results in search engines. Sadly, many of these companies achieve top Google rankings without considering what happens next.

 

Top search rankings do not equal conversion success.

 

Here’s a hypothetical example. Let’s say you search for “narrow tap shoes” in Google. The top result includes “narrow tap shoes” in its page title and description.

Then you click on the Google display, land on the company’s Web site, and find “narrow tap shoes,” simply repeated several times throughout the banner, headline, main text, footer, etc. The copy itself is practically unreadable.

Unfortunately, this keyword-stuffing strategy is focused on traffic, but it doesn’t help you find what you need; narrow tap shoes.

In addition, the company’s messages are all about how great they are. “We’re the world’s leading tap shoe company … we’re number one, we we we” (you get the picture). There’s very little content about solving the visitors’ need.

You can bet that prospects find no value in this kind of web content and they abandon the site as quickly as possible, looking for someone who can truly help them. It might be the company that shows up #3 or even #7 in Google results.

Therefore, it’s important to keep this approach in mind if you’re focused on developing web content that converts:

1.     Make sure your web content weaves in the 1-3 most relevant key phrases on any given page in an ethical, helpful manner, and

2.     Make sure your web content includes information that’s 100% focused on solving your visitors’ needs. Make it easy for them to convert into customers!

Yes, Google and other search engine results are very important. But they really only matter if your web content converts visitors into customers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Online Marketing. Tagged: customers, DMN NEWS, GOOGLE, KEYWORDS, NICOLE MCKINNEY, PAM FOSTER, SALES, SALES CONVERSION, SEARCH RANKINGS, SHARE, SOCIAL MEDIA, SOCIAL NETWORKING COMMUNITY, TRAFFIC, VISITORS, WEB CONTENT, WEBSITE, WEBSITE CONVERSIONS, WWW.BCADGROUP.COM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.