In the last section, I walked you through the steps of creating an “optimal” conversion opportunity—essentially setting the stage for the average user to want to convert. But not all people behave the same, or have the same needs; in fact, we’re all pretty darn unique. That’s why one of the biggest factors in conversion optimization success isn’t the stage you set, but the people who come to that stage in the first place.
One of your biggest priorities should be making sure the right types of people make it to your conversion opportunities, and catering to them to maximize the potential for conversion.
Table of Contents
Choosing the Right Platforms
Most of your online marketing efforts (other than conversion optimization for posts) will focus on exploiting external platforms like search engines, advertising opportunities, and social media sites to funnel traffic to your site or landing page. Your first step should therefore be choosing the “right” platforms—the ones with the highest likelihood of sending appropriate traffic to your site.
- Know your demographics. Take a minute to analyze only specific demographics you’re targeting icon with your conversion strategy. Early in this guide, I mentioned the importance of doing your market research before even beginning a campaign—now, you’ll need to call upon that research to help you figure out what types of platforms you’re going to use. For example, every social media site has a unique demographic makeup—while Facebook pages and Twitter might be good for some companies, Instagram might be better for others. Know what platforms and what types of communication your key demographics use, and cater to them there.
(Image Source: Pew Research)
- Know your buy cycle. Knowing your demographic data includes is helpful, but you’ll also need to understand your industry’s buying cycle. For some consumer products, this is pretty basic; when a light bulb burns out, you have to buy a new one. But for other products and services, like a link building service, potential clients go through periods of awareness, interest atgs, research, and eventually final decision making. Depending on your goals, you may need to focus on users in one specific area; for example, if you’re trying to build more email subscribers, the “awareness” stage is an ideal opportunity, but if you’re trying to get pre defined solid leads, you need to target people further along in the buying cycle.
- Know your dispositions. If conversions are your ultimate goal, you need to cater to certain user dispositions. For example, if you’re selling something fun and exciting, you need to hit people when they’re feeling good (and make them feel good). If you’re selling a conservative financial product, like insurance, you need to hit people when they’re feeling cautious or especially prudent. Knowing these potential customer dispositions can help you target them appropriately through your messaging and channels of choice.
- Hitting multiple targets. Don’t feel limited to choose only one demographic at a time; your product or service may appeal to multiple people, or you may have multiple different goals going at once. If you are targeting multiple people at once, it’s a good idea to segment your strategy as much as possible, such as by creating separate landing pages for each of your preferred audience.
- Facebook Audience Optimization. When it comes to facebook audience optimization, there are a few key things to keep in mind. First, consider your preferred audience. Who do you want to reach with your Facebook Audience Optimization? Once you have a target audience in mind, you can begin to narrow down your facebook custom audience options. There are a variety of organic targeting tool options available on Facebook Audience optimization for posts, so take some time to explore what’s available and select the ones that make the most sense for your business. Additionally, keep an eye on your facebook metrics. Pay attention to how your ads are performing and adjust your targeting icon accordingly. By regularly monitoring your facebook audience optimization, you can ensure that you’re always reaching your preferred target market. Facebook offers a powerful tool for preferred audience optimization called Audience Insights. This tool allows you to research your preferred audience, understand their needs and interests, and craft your messages accordingly. With custom audience Insights, you can identify your ideal customer, learn what motivates them, and develop strategies for reaching them on Facebook audience optimization for posts. In short, Facebook audience optimization is a must for any business that wants to succeed on the platform. By understanding your lookalike audiences restrictions and tailoring your facebook strategy to their needs, you can achieve impressive results. So if you’re serious about facebook marketing, make sure to take advantage of this powerful tool.
Headlines, Lead-Ins, and Audience Targeting
There’s a kind of “pre-party” that happens before the actual CTA, which can influence whether you’re successful in getting a conversion. You’ll have an advertisement, or a piece of syndicated content, or some other external post designed to get people to your site. How you frame this can influence whether or not a person simply clicked through, and once they get there, can influence whether or not they stick around to convert.
- Getting the click. Your first goal is getting the actual click, and to do that, you’ll need a powerful and interesting headline. You’ll generally have a finite amount of space to work with here, so you’ll have to pack as much meaning as you can into your lead-in. Make sure your message is tailored to your target audience optimization; appeal to their emotions, their values, and even their norms to make sure you’re attracting the right segment of your preferred audience. Then, offer value and include a tease, such as “we’re cutting prices on one of our best practices items,” which conveys an element of the value you’re offering without giving everything away up front. This will help you secure more clicks from the people you need most on your site.
- Setting the right expectations. Sensational headlines, like “you won’t believe what we’re offering now,” are tempting to include because they will, in all likelihood, generate more clicks for your site or landing page. The problem is, these types of headlines tend to over-hype what you’re actually selling or offering. Your visitors may feel misled, or at the very least oversold, and they’ll probably be less likely to convert as a result.
- Appealing to your audience. Finally, you want to be sure you’re sending your audience insights somewhere appropriate for them. If you have segmented interest tags & landing pages, ensure that you’re directing your traffic to the appropriate segment. Otherwise, run a final check of your images, headlines, copy, and offers to make sure they’re all in line with your audience’s expectations and desires.
- Audience optimization. Audience optimization is the process of tailoring content to best practices reach its target audience and preferred audience. This can be done through a variety of means, such as using keywords and other search engine optimization techniques to ensure that your content appears in relevant search results. Additionally, enable audience optimization for posts also involves using social media to reach out to potential readers and followers who may be interested in your content. By taking the time for properly audience optimization, you can significantly increase your chances of reaching your target readership. Audience optimization tool is important for a number of reasons. First, it helps you to identify your target audience and craft content that is relevant to their interest tags. Second, it allows you to track your custom audience based engagement with your content, so that you can gauge its effectiveness. Finally, audience optimization can help you to adjust your content strategy in real-time, based on feedback from your target readership. In short, audience optimization for posts is an targeting tool for any content marketer who wants to produce high-quality, targeted content.
New vs. Returning Visitors
Your new and returning visitors will likely behave differently, based on the type of business you run. For example, with an eCommerce platform, a returning visitor has likely already been through the ordering process once, from start to finish. Accordingly, they know they can trust you, so you’ll have less of a need to prove your trustworthiness through social proof, trust badges, and similar factors. For a B2B service, a returning visitor will likely be further along in the buy cycle than a new visitor, and they’ll want to see a different list of benefits. In almost any case, returning visitors are more likely to convert than new visitors.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to serve returning users differently than you serve new users, such as directing them to a different version of your website. What you can do, however, is set up a separate flow for your new visitors, creating specific landing pages for visitors you know to be unaware of your brand that work on building trust and awareness. You can also use the behavior flow chart in Google Analytics to better understand how your new and returning visitors behave differently once onsite, using this information to refine your optimization efforts.
Bounce and Exit Rates
Bounce and exit rates are distinct, but for our purposes, they mean the same thing; a user has become disinterested with your site, and leaves before converting. Bounce and exit rates are valuable pieces of information that help you understand where your users tend to leave your site, and possibly, why they tend to do it.
Why is this important for conversions? With so many conversion opportunities throughout your site, and a user population that’s likely going to explore your site somewhat thoroughly before converting, the longer the average user stays on your site, the likelier they’ll be to eventually convert (or at least walk away with a good impression of your brand). A high bounce and exit rate could mar an otherwise solid conversion optimization campaign, so it’s in your best practices interest tags to improve your site’s performance here.
I won’t spend much time digging into the logistics of improving your bounce rate, as this could be a topic worthy of its own guide, but KissMetrics does a pretty good job of outlining the basics here.
(Image Source: KissMetrics)
Conversion Values
I want to end this section with one peripheral consideration—a variable that can influence your overall effectiveness in conversion optimization. It’s all about the value of your conversions. Not all conversions are equally valuable, and emphasizing an unprofitable conversion could cause you to spend too much money on an ineffective strategy.
Your greatest tool here is awareness—you need to understand exactly how valuable each of your conversion opportunities is. Combined with knowledge of your total number of conversions and traffic, you can make a good estimate for your marketing ROI—but I’ll get into that later. For now, let’s look at how to calculate the value of a given conversion in three dimensions:
- Straight purchases. Straightforward product purchases are the easiest to calculate. Depending on your intention, you can determine the average “cart” order of a new visitor, or determine the average lifetime spending habits of a new customer. Keep in mind you’ll need to filter first-time conversions from repeat buyers in these metrics.
- Leads. Leads are somewhat more complex. First, you’ll need to determine your average close rate and interest tags , which is partially dependent on your sales performance and partially dependent on the strength of your leads (going back to the enable audience optimization side of things). From there, you’ll need to calculate the average lifetime value of a customer. With this knowledge, you can multiply your close ratio by your average customer value to get the average value of a conversion here and organic reach.
- Subscribership. Email subscribership is even more difficult to calculate, because it’s hard to determine exactly which variables and factors influenced a long-term email subscriber to finally make a purchase. Was the customer already interest tags when signing up? Was it the strength of your email campaign that pushed them over the edge? You can play around with your email marketing statistics to try and determine the value of a new subscriber here, but you’re better off keeping this exclusive to the email marketing side of your marketing analysis.
With greater knowledge of your audience optimization tool, your conversion values, and the moving parts of your strategy, you can move onto the ongoing elements of successful campaign management.
Tim holds expertise in building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams.
When he's not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach...preferably in Hawaii.
Over the years he's written for publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.
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