Rather you are a new business trying to convert your first sale or you’re trying to increase your business’s revenue, being a small business owner is tough, and we all started somewhere. I know when I launched Dog Byte Marketing last year, things were very slow, no business slow. I started using advertisements and I saw the traffic pouring in, but saw no sales. I understand how you feel, exhausting all sources of advertising and seeing all of those views coming in, but no conversions. It’s a hard pill to swallow.
How would you get your attention?
So, back to the problem at hand. I was getting visitors, but they weren’t converting. How could I get their attention? I needed to first analyze my audience. I wanted to target small businesses because I myself am a small business owner. I needed to put myself in their shoes.
Know your product
If I am looking for a company to market my small business, what would I be looking for? Well for one, I want the company to be knowledgeable. Marketing adds a tremendous amount of work to an already massive plate, and I would want someone that knows what they are doing to handle my brand. Now in this thought process, if you were selling a product, a customer would want you to understand how the product works, in case they need to come back for assistance with said product.
Build Rapport
This leads to my next point, trust. Honestly, at that point, this step is already in motion. By you showing you are knowledgeable with your product, you’ll start to build trust with your customer, because they’ll feel like they can come back to you for additional help.
How I started converting
This is all sounds perfect when you’re talking to customers in person, but online is a whole other story. I needed to grab their attention before they “bounced”, more on that later. If I have all of these visitors and no one is converting, I need to be able to provide them with either knowledge or trust. I took a look at the site and noticed a lack of content, and decided to try testing there. By providing more information to my potential clients I could give them some insight on my knowledge in the industry.
What does bounced mean?
When a visitor goes to your website, and then leaves without doing anything, this is considered a bounce. These metrics are things you should be analyzing in your testing.
How do I see if a visitor bounces?
Google Analytics is a key tool to analyzing your company’s performance. If you aren’t using this, then I’ve probably just changed your life.
Wait, what happened in your testing?
Something interesting happened in the testing, my bounce rate dropped and I started getting visitors to my quote form, but I still wasn’t getting any bites. After analyzing the data yet again, I went back to putting myself in their shoes, looking at the form, I thought if knowledge was getting them to the form, maybe trust is now the issue? Keep in mind the steps so far, because chances are, you’ve probably seen a popup informing you about our “Free Marketing Audit” service. How does this establish trust you might add? Because I start the process of putting a face to the company. I personally reach out to those who ask for a free audit. By telling them where their problems lie and educating them on why it’s a problem, they’ll understand the knowledge and skills I bring to the table, which in turn will make them more likely to become my client.
But, how did you get them to contact you?
It’s all in the title of my service. Free Marketing Audit. Everyone loves free and everyone loves to make money. What do they have to lose by reaching out? They have the potential to gain insight on how to grow their business, and when it works, they’ll know I’m knowledgeable, and be more likely to return for additional services.
What if I sell physical products?
Excellent question! While I can’t give away all the secrets, I will say… did you know I personally give free Marketing Audits? See what I did there? 😉
Earlier your mentioned advertising?
Maybe you’ve got a solid website, and you have Analytics set up, but no one is coming to your website? Chances are you’re trying to go the organic route to save money. While it is completely possible to start a business 100% organically, a vast amount of time goes into writing content, which makes this extremely difficult, especially without Search Engine Optimization tools. Tools I might add, that cost more in both dollars and time than it would to use that money for advertising. Sites like Google Ads or Facebook Ads are really affordable and allow you to refine your audience to best fit your brand. If you take this on yourself, be cautious and ensure your keywords are refined. Otherwise, you’ll be paying for keywords that represent no part of your business.
To sum it up
Many clients don’t know there is extra revenue being left on the table. The key steps here as a small business are analyzing and testing. Analyze your traffic to find your bounce rate, and test various methods for converting said traffic, otherwise you are leaving money on the table. Advertising is the fastest way to gain traffic, from there you’ll need to analyze your visitors and perform A/B Testing to figure out what converts your traffic into customers. As you start to grow, you’ll naturally start to gain organic growth. From there you may want to consider hiring a Creative Content Writer.
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