Why Do Visitors Leave My Website (Pt. 2)

In our first article in this series on Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) we looked at how to approach  CRO if you don’t have a lot of traffic flowing to your site.  Here we identify some of the areas to think about to generate more leads and provide you with a number of tools to help you achieve your goals.

Analyse

Situational analysis is a broad subject – too broad for those not blessed with a large marketing team, so I’d like to offer 3 practical things you should do and 3 free, ungated tools to help you.

1. Try to answer the question, “Why am I in business?”The answer isn’t anything to do with profitability or making money.  Those are the products of running a successful business, not the raison d’être for your company.

You might find this positioning statement development template helpful in helping to articulate your ideas as precisely as possible.  This will give you some insights into your target market. 

2. Identify good fit prospects. You cannot help everyone – even good companies – and if you try you will damage your reputation and you may damage their business too.

This prospect evaluation worksheet will help you work out what a good fit prospect looks like for you.

3. It can be tempting to miss out setting goals and defining clear metrics and reporting regimes to make those goals meaningful, but if you those who don’t won’t know if they’re simply wasting money for scant rewards.

So here’s our final tool, a template to help you understand how to create your marketing and sales goals.

Communicate

To generate traffic you need to tell your prospects something about your business.  These are just a few of the simplest types of content that everyone could be using to generate traffic.

Start to blog

You might have seen this one coming!  Here are two stats that may interest you, from our friends at HubSpot.

1. Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies that published zero to four monthly posts. (HubSpot, 2015)
2. B2B companies that blogged 11+ times per month had almost three times more traffic than those blogging 0-1 times per month. (HubSpot, 2015)

Post blogs on your website and promote them on social media.

Post some videos on social media (or send them by email)

Did you know that 20% of people will read the text on a page, but 80% of people will watch a video? (My SMN, 2017).

Very short, informal videos really work well in both social media and email.

Advertise

Social media advertising and search engine don’t have to break the bank, but there are rules.  Ads can be disruptive, but if they accurately and directly answer the questions your prospects are posing, they can be helpful rather than intrusive.

The same keyword research that you did for the blogs applies here.  That initial investment in thinking and researching is repaid many times over – in advertising;  videos, infographics; blogs; social media posts and email campaigns.

Generate a response

We are nearly ready to launch our helpfulness on the world but there are still a few important steps to take – and the first is the call to action, (CTA).

CTAs

Remember your buyers are on a journey.  We are looking to collect leads that are close to making a decision and so our CTAs will be inviting them to sign up.

But if your prospects are just becoming aware of their problems, your content will be largely educational and your CTA will invite them to learn more. And if they are considering options, your content might focus on solution strategies and your CTA may be to sign up for some research.

We will come back to this later in the series.

Offers

These are things you want to give to your prospect that are so valuable to them that will give up their name and contact details in return and give you permission to continue the conversation with them.

Here are just 3 simple rules to bear in mind when making an offer

1. Make sure offers align with your products and services. You’ll find nothing here that offers graphic design or helps you with your visual identity – they’re important but  not our thing.
2. Make sure your offers are aimed at the point on the journey where your buyer is standing. If your product is complex and your blog is educational for early stage prospects, don’t offer them 10% off for an immediate purchase.
3. Don’t be passive. Promote your offers to ensure they are discoverable by the prospects you want to see them.

Forms

If you want leads you need to collect information about your prospects.  But carefully! Have you ever been confronted with a form that looks more like a tax return than a marketing exercise?  Marketers love to have all that information but people hate filling them in.

That doesn’t mean that all forms have to be short.  One rule of thumb is to align forms to the value of the offer.  The more valuable the offer, the more you can ask.

Landing Pages

And finally…landing pages.  This is where you put your form to capture your prospect information.  Most landing pages try to dispense with any distractions that might lure the customer away from the job in hand – signing up for the offer.  So, although the landing page should look like the rest of your website, it shouldn’t have navigation on it to entice the visitor away to other parts of the site.

The form itself should collect the information you need and no more than that, and the button at the end probably shouldn’t say submit, but something more enticing like ‘download it here’.

Behind the form should be a data capture engine that stores the data and the consent of the data provider if required.

Hope you found this spurs your thinking. Next week we’ll look at the relationship between CRO and revenue.