It can be difficult to get meaningful success from your digital marketing. Adwords, social media, SEO and newsletter marketing can be time-consuming and expensive, and the ‘success’ claimed by different platforms and marketing agencies often consists of empty numbers.
The key is to focus on your goals at the start of campaign planning, and map these to conversion measures that you can track on your website. Once you have a clear purpose you can target the right audience with valuable content, and follow our tips to increase your conversion rate.
Define your goals and conversions
To make sure you get a good ROI, you need a clear idea of what success means to your organisation.
Define your goals, and then translate them into conversion measures. Conversions just refer to users taking meaningful interactions on your site, including:
- sales
- enquiries
- newsletter sign-ups
- resource downloads
- playing a video for a certain duration
Example: Ko Tātou conversions
For example, the Ko Tātou website helps New Zealanders protect the country’s biosecurity. They hold an annual Biosecurity awards ceremony, and people can nominate someone for an award through their online form. Form submissions are one of their key conversions.
We helped Ko Tātou track their conversions from different traffic sources with an automated dashboard. The dashboard shows traffic volumes and conversions from each marketing channel. Below is the ‘social media’ module, and there are similar modules for organic search, referral traffic etc.
Increase your conversions
Once you’ve defined your conversions, you’re ready to run a marketing campaign. The digital marketing platform you use will depend on your audience. Our clients are often interested in Adwords, however this is a very technical platform to use and agency campaigns are expensive.
Paid social marketing is a great place to start if you want to do it yourself – you pay to reach different communities across a social platform. It’s low cost, generally easy to use, and you can target your campaign to specific audiences.
1. Research your audience and industry
Find out more about your audience to understand what they need. What are their priorities? What do they want from you? Talk to clients, review industry marketing research and dive into your website analytics and Google search data to create a valuable offering.
Research your competitors. What are they offering online? What is unique about your offering? Are their gaps in the market that you can fill?
2. Bring people to your website from marketing campaigns
Your digital marketing activities should lead people back to your website. It’s where you share your full offering and where people can engage meaningfully with your services. Add targeted website links to your campaigns.
3. Beware of home page clicks
Sending campaign traffic to your home page often leads to bounces (people visiting just one page on your website). If people just visit your home page then leave it’s like someone walking on by your storefront without entering your shop.
It’s better to run task-based campaigns, where you target specific audiences and offer them content that will help them in some way. Promote deep-level content pages which provide a clear and intuitive path to conversions.
4. Make it easy for people to get something done
Make it easy for people to complete tasks on your site. For example, if you have an online form, remove unnecessary fields so that it’s quick and easy to submit. Go through the form yourself and make sure there are no frustrating blockers and error messages. Same with your purchase process.
It’s amazing to see the effect of simple improvements – at Te Papa venues we increased online enquiries by a third, just by simplifying the form.
5. Measure your performance to learn what works
High conversion rates are difficult to achieve, and it’s unlikely that you’ll nail it right from the start. Track the performance of your campaigns, and make tweaks based on insights. Start small and test different approaches to see what works.
Set up regular performance reporting to get the most out of your marketing – an automated dashboard is a great way to monitor performance.
Get in touch if you’d like help creating a marketing conversion dashboard – let’s chat.