Increasing your conversion rates is absolutely crucial.  Discover simple website edits that help manufacturers improve website performance.

How to Convert Website Traffic into Leads 

An eye-catching website is an essential component of any digital marketing strategy. However, having a good-looking website won’t necessarily convert web traffic into qualified leads. The best websites engage the audience, educate them, and demonstrate that your product or service is a viable solution to their challenges.

The challenge for marketing departments is knowing what site changes to implement because there are many variables that affect conversions. Short of conducting extensive split testing, in-house marketing teams must incrementally test different variables to see what performs best.

Here are some of the most common website edits we implement to help clients increase website conversions.

Don’t Beat Around the Bush: Clearly State Your Value Proposition

Don’t bury this information! It should be front and center on your home page and any campaign landing pages. Knowing your target market, their pain points and how you solve them is of utmost importance. Do you understand the journey they take in order to solve these challenges? If you don’t immediately speak to your target markets’ needs, you’ve lost them.

Crafting these messages, both written and visual, is an art and a science. You need to consider how the visitor is arriving at your site – via organic Google search, display ad or PPC ad – and how the verbiage on the page builds on the information they expect to find.

Here are some content/messaging best practices to consider:

• Make the text scannable and use short paragraphs. Visitors will only read about 20% of your content.
• Be concise. Be relevant. Use action verbs.
• Omit unnecessary words and minimize jargon.
• Incorporate plenty of headlines. Be short and direct. Headlines should stand on their own and be understood out of context of the rest of the text.
• Front load important information.
•  It’s OK to leave the visitor wanting more.

Pro Tip: A meaningful value proposition is built on a strong understanding of your target market. Make sure you have detailed buyer personas to reference. 

Ready to take action? Let’s have a conversation. 

Make Your Objective Clear

Just like with your value proposition, don’t bury this! Make it clear and obvious what you want your website visitors to do.

Is the first step in your buyer’s journey educational? Perhaps they should download an eBook or review product specs.

Is your product highly customizable for the unique needs of each client? Perhaps you might want to highlight case studies that demonstrate your ability to partner with customers and solve complex problems.

Remember this is step one of what could be a long and winding buyer’s journey! It’s your job to test and learn what’s going to move the lead through this journey efficiently.

The Three-Click Rule

Whenever we’re working on a website, we constantly ask this question: Are we getting the visitor to the information they want in three clicks or less?

If users can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they are likely to become frustrated and leave your website. This gets tricky for manufacturers with a robust set of products or services, or products that are complex in nature that might require the visitor to explore technical specifications.

Here are some items to keep in mind:

Navigation Bar: Make sure you have clear navigation at the top of the site. Visitors shouldn’t have to think too much about where they need to go; good navigation will lead them throughout the site naturally.

Site Search Tool: For websites that contain a lot of product data, consider an optimized search tool that will return relevant and accurate results.

Website Forms: Placement of lead capture forms is critical. You don’t want to turn customers off by immediately shoving a contact form in their face.

Buttons and Links: Use well labeled buttons, links and calls to action that tell users where they are and where they will be headed.

Build Trust With Reviews, Testimonials, or Case Studies

Testimonials play a valuable role in building trust and increasing sales. According to research from BrightLocal, 88% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Case studies also play a role in shaping buyer perception by illustrating a company’s success. By explaining how a customer used a product to solve a problem, you can demonstrate what your brand delivers and represents. Your leads are more likely to convert if you can show that others have benefited from what you’re offering.

Full-Length Case Studies: For longer case studies, we like to use the S.O.A.R. format. This stands for Situation, Opportunity, Action Taken and Results Generated.

Mini Case Studies: Some projects don’t require a detailed case study, but we find that there is still a story worth telling. Use mini-case studies to highlight customer wins as well.

Add a Live Chat or a Chatbot

Big companies like Amazon or Zappos have trained us to expect instant gratification, if not demand it. A recent study by Salesforce Research has shown that all buyers have the same expectations regardless of the purchase type. The study also indicated that 80% of business buyers expect real-time communications.

Don’t let this create unnecessary stress for your marketing and sales department. Chatbots can bridge the gap between getting questions answered immediately and speaking with a live human. Even a simple chatbot can capture contact information and reassure the website visitor that help is on the way.

Before you shoot down this idea, reasoning that chatbots are impersonal and don’t align with your brand, consider how this could accelerate your sales and marketing. Depending on how you build your chatbot, you have the potential to streamline lead qualification, lead nurturing and meeting scheduling. Aren’t these the same reasons we leverage other tools like email marketing?

Be available to your customers where and when they are looking for your services. Test a chatbot or a live chat feature and measure how it affects conversions.

Next Steps to Increase Your Website Conversions

Set aside any preconceptions you have about what you think might work and what won’t. It’s amazing how much of our own perceptions influence our decision making. And remember that a website is always in development. You should always be testing and learning to better understand your audience and improve conversions.

Hopefully the tips above will help increase website conversions. Have more questions about your website content, design or user experience? Reach out to us directly.

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What makes marketing so challenging?

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Discover how manufacturers can generate more web traffic, leads and sales for measurable growth.

How to Generate More Traffic, Leads and Sales 

Good marketers know that it takes more than an eye-catching website to generate traffic, leads and sales. You have to work to get your message and your brand in front of customers.

The more quality traffic you generate will help increase the number of leads and conversions for your sales team. This is a numbers game built on maintaining strong internet visibility. The best marketers explore multiple methods to increase website traffic in order to achieve consistent, year-over-year traffic growth.

Here are five tried and true ways we’ve generated more website traffic for our manufacturing clients.

Always Be Optimizing Your Website

Website optimization isn’t one and done. It’s an ongoing task. While the frequency of these updates will be determined by the competitiveness of your specific niche/keywords, it’s necessary to make this a reoccurring priority. Updating on-page elements like title tags and meta descriptions are important.

The single biggest step you can take is to publish new content in the form of articles, case studies or podcast transcripts. Search engines continue to reward new content, so keep this in mind if your goal is to attract more organic traffic.

Pay-Per-Click Ads with Google and Bing

The caveat to this is that will take some testing to nail down the exact targeting in order to get results.

Retargeting Campaigns

Estimates say that 75% to 85% of people who visit your site will never return. You’ve dedicated time and resources to get visitors on your site, but without staying top of mind, they are off exploring other websites – perhaps even your competitors’ websites.

We’ve all experienced retargeting campaigns. You might be casually shopping for a new bike helmet, and suddenly those helmets start popping up wherever you go online. You can do the same thing with your own products and services. Most companies target recent website visitors for a period of 15 to 30 days. For manufacturers that have longer sales cycles, you might consider “following” them around for longer.

There are several tools that make retargeting campaigns super easy to implement. Our two favorites are Google Ads and AdRoll.

Submit Guest Articles to Industry Publications

Targeted Emails to Current and Perspective Clients

Email is one of our favorite ways to generate a noticeable uptick in traffic to your website. If it’s a warm audience composed of past and current customers, you can ensure top of mind awareness through emails. A cold email list of prospects that you have acquired from, say, a trade show can be nurtured over time to build awareness for your brand.

Increasing the traffic to your website is the first step to generating measurable marketing results. Are you wondering how to generate traffic to your website?  Contact us if you have questions about these strategies.

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What makes marketing so challenging?

Trying to keep-up with the tools, technology and the limited attention span of your target market are all challenging. Get our tips on how to grow leads and revenue, delivered directly to your inbox.