Part 1 recap:
“Marketing, all right, I get it,” you exclaim. “But our resources and time are limited. We need to concentrate on our mission. What are we supposed to do?”
Do you want to increase visits to your site? Attract more social media followers? Increase leads, revenue, donations, members by 20 percent?
Whatever your goals and objectives are, make sure they are quantifiable so you can track trends and progress, gauge the results of your strategies, and pivot when necessary.
If you haven’t done so already, I recommend setting up Google Analytics for your website to get started tracking site visitors, page views, impressions, etc. You can also sign up for Google Trends, which uses real-time search data to help you gauge consumer search behaviors over time. Sign up for Google Alerts or Social Mention to track when your business is mentioned online.
Focus on your website’s user experience (UX). Assuming you have already built a website, focusing on UX should require little cost but will pay big dividends.
UX refers to how easily navigable and understandable your site is, how fast, and how easily a visitor can engage in whatever action is offered.
I cannot stress enough how important UX is to optimizing your marketing funnel. If marketing’s purpose is to attract attention to and build demand for what you’ve created, then you want to attract, educate, and convert your users as fluidly as possible.
Qualaroo recommends focusing primarily on two aspects of UX:
Golden Rule No. 1: Eliminate Distractions
According to Unbounce, attention ratio is “The ratio of links on a landing page to the number of campaign conversion goals.”
In other words, attention ratio is the proportion of things a visitor can do on a given page divided by the number of things you want him or her to do. Ideally, you want a user to be able to take only one action per landing page. The golden rule of your website/landing page should be: Keep users focused on the main conversion point by eliminating or not including other distractions.
You don’t want people to just visit your page. You want them to act once they are there. So, make it as easy and compelling as possible for them by including these elements found in a landing page that CONVERTS:
C = Clear Call to Action
O = Offer
N = Narrow Focus
V = VIA: Very Important Attributes
E = Effective Headline
R = Resolution-Savvy Layout
T = Tidy Visuals
S = Social Proof
—Beth Morgan, Kissmetrics
Pretend you are a first-time visitor to your site. What do you see? Does the point of each page come across readily? Is each page easily navigable? Can you convert on each with ease?
Keep these five landing page elements in mind when optimizing your user experience:
Golden Rule No. 2: Always Be Testing!
After you have built a solid landing page, A/B test it. An A/B test compares two versions of a web page and monitors which one performs better. Platforms such as Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely are cost-effective ways to run these tests using algorithms to find approximate statistical significance.
For your A/B test, change one (and just one) of the elements listed above. Don’t worry—you can test another element in a future test. In fact, constantly testing and updating your site are the keys to increased conversion and the best way to avoid static results.
As you evaluate your A/B test results, start to map out the flow of users from outside your sphere of influence to the first conversion point. Different traffic sources sometimes lend themselves to different levels of understanding and engagement. Think about how a user typically gets to your site:
Come back in a few weeks, when we will dive into marketing outreach (attraction), the beginning stages of search engine optimization (SEO), and creating welcome nurture tracks/onboarding emails to educate your new visitors and move them down your funnels.
Author: David Mundy
Source: GuideStar