Once you have optimized your website or blog, published great content, and started promoting on social networks, you will start seeing a spike in web traffic. Is that enough?
Well, you’re happy when your site is generating new business from this traffic spike. Simply put, when you can convert traffic into sales.
You need to focus on conversion, and this is when you will have to go through four psychological sales phases. Provided you’ve handled these phases right, you will see strangers turning into customers, and even promoters. Here’s what you have to do:
1. Attract
First thing first, learn to attract visitors. You may use social networks, emailers, blogposts to create this golden window.
You need to create something that looks compelling to your target audience. It could be anything from a template, service, product and e-book to a tool and other gated resources. It is important that your offering targets the type of people you want to attract.
A golf instructor would be better off creating an offer that would attract golfers trying to improve their game. A sales process consultant would be better off creating offers to attract executives who want to improve their sales process. A fashion apparel website will gain more with an extra stuff or discount on purchase.
A solid understanding of your audience is what takes you further. Be sure to utilize buyers personas – it is more of a semi-fictional representation of your customers, but it will always base on actual customer data.
Closing the Attract loop better, using PAS method works amazingly well. It helps you create the right hook content, which focuses on “Talking about the Problem”, Agitating the same and then offering the solution.
2. Convert
After you have created your targeted content offer, this is the time to use and ensure your calls-to-action work. This will help create leads. A call-to-action is simply a link that encourages your visitors to click and direct them to your landing page or purchase page. These calls could be anywhere and everywhere – in emails or blog pots, on website pages, within content offer, to a name a few.
Spend some time creating and perfecting your call-to-action because it will be the key trigger behind lead generation. Using a need of urgency is proved to trigger the action.
3. Close
A call-to-action will take them to your landing page where they will take a decision and have to complete the action sharing their contact details or make an order.
What seems to have worked in many cases is answering your audience objections and limitations on your landing pages. This not only weeds out the last minute hesitation but also builds trust and encourages them to take an action.
You or your sales team can follow-up with these visitors and even manage to close the deal. A well-planned and well-built landing page can convert a high percentage of your visitors into leads.
4. Delight
It is important to delight your leads irrespective of conversion, which is not easy. Keep it simple yet interesting by offering something valuable on a consistent basis. You may also consider offering incentives of higher value from time to time and reward them for being one of the connects at certain milestones.
Finally, inspire and encourage your subscribers to share their views about your service or any products they have seen or tried. Take them to your social networks and ask for an opinion. If they do it, you have achieved your task of turning strangers into even collaborators. They may not use your services themselves but considering your such smart process, they wouldn’t mind sharing the same in their networks.
Summarizing quickly, you have to take serious initiatives to convert your site visitors into sales leads. For this, you will have to come up with a convincing content offer, create a call-to-action to advertise that offer, and create a landing page to collect your visitors’ information in exchange for that offer.
It is, of course, easier said than done. To make it easier, keep the core thinking tasks to yourself and prefer taking professional’s help in planning, drafting, writing and designing the offer.
Do you have an input to make this process easier and faster? What has been your experience? Share & help.
Sunita Biddu is a digital business coach and power blogging mentor helping coaches and small business owners. She helps with building a strong and profitable online presence and reputation that creates a self-sustaining business. Sunita writes on this blog once a week about easy-to-use guides and articles about business, coaching, social media and blogging. You can grab some of her free resources and ebooks from the resources section.