We recently had some great wins for our clients, doubling and tripling conversion rate and enquiries, awesome – that’s definitely why I turn up to work each day. But more often than not, then next challenge is ‘now we just need more traffic!’. So is it the chicken or the egg: clicks or conversions? Are there other influencing factors that will propel digital strategy? I recently spoke to a successful ecommerce storeowner about this challenge and his response was straight up…
“Have a product that people want to buy!”
This sobering statement taps into the fundamentals of doing business every day of the week and not just in the digital landscape:
- Is there a market for your product or service?
- Does the positioning of your brand and product connect with that market?
- What is the most effective way to access the market?
- Am I making it easy for the market to buy said product or service?
With the overload of available statistics and performance data of your digital strategies it is so easy to get lost in detail rather than taking a step back, looking at the economic fundamentals of a product or service and designing a holistic strategy that CONNECTS WITH THE BUYER. If this connection is online, awesome, if not, that’s ok too – every product and market has it’s own ecosystem that requires a unique strategy.
If you have found a way to make those connections between your product and buyer online, then happy days! Hopefully you have a competitive advantage that maintains that winning formula before your competitors discover the magic.
So what are the signs that your digital strategy sucks? Should you be chasing conversions or clicks or developing a better product? Here is an example of a scenario we see everyday…
Problem: I am getting good traffic to my product page, but very low or no conversion rate! Help!
Solution: There are several issues to investigate…
- Does anyone what to buy my product? Is there a pricing mismatch “value vs price” compared to other similar products? Market testing is required.
- Is your traffic coming from the right market? User behaviour analytics needs to be investigated.
- Does the presentation of the product or service on the website need addressing? Are there issues around trustworthiness, quality of presentation, or price v value messages that aren’t mirroring the user’s intent? Addressing UI, UX and sales copy is imperative.
- Does the market need more educating before making a purchase decision? User journeys need refining, engaging content is a must – video maybe the answer.
- Is the journey the prospective buyer takes smooth and engaging (UX)? Investigate how users are moving through your site using screen recording tools – make decisions based on real user behaviour.
- Are there unnecessary roadblocks stopping the buyer from buying? Cart & checkout processes may need review. Do you really need the 5 unwanted popup windows that cramp the user’s experience, just to ask them to sign-up to a newsletter that you have never sent?
Problem: My product rocks and is converting well, I just can’t generate enough traffic to the page.
Solution:
Firstly, congratulations! You have a product or service that people want! That is one of the biggest hurdles. Here are some issues and solutions to increasing traffic:
- The market maybe too small. You would think that this is rare in the international digital landscape, but maybe the product is too early for market acceptance and the market needs educating to get them over the line.
- The market is too difficult to access. In some industries, standard advertising and traffic generation methodologies just don’t work – time to get creative with your marketing and sales strategies. Combine online and offline techniques, this can especially be the case with service based business.
- Lots of competition and the cost of acquisition is too high. In Google’s mature search market, this is a very common issue. Again you need to get creative, going head-to-head with big business on common keyword bidding is a recipe for disaster – the only one that wins is Google or Facebook. Experiment with a mix of paid, onpage and offpage search optimisation, social, blogger networks, in-app-ads and email to get your traffic numbers up. Test and measure with each channel, dump the ones that don’t work and keep the winners. Think about where your market LIVE and spend their time online. If it isn’t Facebook – don’t spend time or money there.
- I am not appearing in Google organic results for the search terms I want. So there are thousands of articles online dealing with SEO, I won’t go there in detail now, except to say even though SEO has been given a bad name, it is a critical building block of your overall strategy that will create long term success for your business. It must be at the core of how your website is designed, built and part of your monthly digital marketing strategy using both onpage and offpage methodologies.
KND Digital’s philosophy is to get fundamentals right first. Too many times we see businesses jumping ahead of themselves, handing thousands of dollars to Google and Facebook in paid advertising, wondering why the phone isn’t ringing.
The chicken and egg argument is no more…
- Solid product/service with ‘on-point’ positioning that matches market expectations.
- Build that positioning into website experiences that convert.
- Generate as much traffic as you can.
- Test, measure and rework your strategies.
