A lot of things are simple and pleasurable, that first sip of wine on a Saturday evening, a fresh breeze on a hot summer’s night and building a high converting business online. How do I grow my business online is a question we are asked often. That’s why we wrote this blog post.
Is it Simple to Create Business Online?
The structure, the foundation and the channels for online business are simple. It’s the combination that is not easy. There are very simple rules:
First, the website you build is not your ‘baby.’ It belongs to your prospects and your customers and clients.
Second, a page on that website should be focused and answer this question for the visitor ‘what’s in it for me.’
Third, never make people think when they visit. Simple direction, Call to Action, in the jargon is the order of the day.
Lastly, be prepared to test, make changes and think constantly. If that page is not creating sales (conversions in the jargon), why? Come up with ideas and test them. Now, if you have a lot of visitor (data) you can go down the route of an A versus B page test.
Most of you won’t have enough data to have any confidence in an A/B page test, therefore break down the page into its elements, headlines, imagery, video and copy.
Now, be BOLD. Which major change could increase the conversions? Try it. Then try something else.
The Centre of the Universe
Isn’t you. It is your website. A website combined with your email list is the ‘hub’ of all you do online. Why is this combination so valuable?
Because you control both. You can put all your information, benefits, story on your website. An email list is a direct relationship, you are not dependent on advertising platforms like Google and Facebook. Control and build that list.
Social networking sales are NOT a magic bullet, yes social platforms can help your business, by growing organically and creating awareness. They also act as social confidence and build loyalty to your most important asset, your Brand Term.
Good Ideas for Business Growth
1. Converting visitors to customers comes down to three things, first if you are an ecommerce business, FREE delivery (where’s the profitable threshold), second your courier’s success rate and third your customer care.
2. Copywriting, O’ yes, this is a key to conversion. You want simple, fun and emotion based copy to sell the product or service. Here’s that old truism to think about ‘sell the sizzle, not the sausage.
3. Build your website with a view to be as adaptable as possible. Websites are organic, they have to keep growing so the platform MUST be easy to change. That includes the design as well as imagery and copy.
4. Own the domain name. You, as a business owner, should be the only person with access to the domain name and the hosting. If things ‘go wrong’ with the agency you can move your site, or start again and tell your domain name provider that the site has moved elsewhere.
5. Search traffic easy to come by for some markets but not for others. The days of creating pages that pick up lots of search traffic are fewer.
6. Collaboration, learn about collaboration on the various platforms. This works especially well for building social following. No need to go after the massive followings, you are better off with several micro ‘influencers’ and a couple of medium ones.
7. Another truism, ‘content is king’, well it is still. It is also queen, jack and ace up your sleeve. Content is anything that entertains or informs. Always be entertaining, funny as possible and a little tongue in cheek works wonders for jaded consumers.
8. Investment in video. Who are you? Show people. People buy from people. Go for a mix of video, pictures and words. Test them. Not everyone wants to know more through video. Would a manual carousel of images work better?
9. Paid Ads. Experiment, have conversion tracking on your website. This is a bit of code, easy for a developer to install, that will show exactly which keywords / ads made the sale.
10. Where are the ‘influencers’ in your market influenced? What are they influenced by? Start at the top.
11. Know your audience, create selling persona, segments and categories of content that match up, the more focused you are the more you can personalise your message.
12. Work on your email list. Did you know you can resend each email to non openers? Do it a couple of times and you increase your open rate.
13. Transactional email, abandoned carts and out of stock. There are solutions for all of these, a slick series of transactional emails with delivery information, emails to abandoned cart people and allowing people to sign up for messages of when your back in stock, all add up to soaking up the gravy.
Bad Ideas for Business Growth
1. Your brand term, don’t use words that people find hard to spell, or makes them think it is difficult to spell, Google will work out what the search is about and correct the spelling, but don’t make it difficult.
Use a juxtaposition of two words that make you unique eg Jelly Trumpet.
2. Using a bot as your first point of call for contacting your business. Only use one with the help of a specialist like Live Chat Factory.
3. Choosing a web platform that is ‘tied down’ and EASY to use. If you do because of budget then make sure you either have all the copy, images and video separate or you can easily export it. By this I mean platforms like Wix and Squarespace.
Ecommerce platforms like Shopify are good as you can build the ‘rental’ of the shop into your overheads. A word here, all platforms will tie you down in some way, with Shopify it means, unless you pay for the top tier you will not have access to the basket / checkout and that can be a disadvantage.
4. Employing social ‘influencers’ who can’t report on the sales / following they make because of their ‘influence’.
5. NOT having a consistent content marketing schedule of different types and NOT being able to understand which content works for who.
6. NOT using analytical tools and reporting on your most important stats on a weekly and monthly basis. Understand that Google Analytics is not wholly accurate and it only tells you what visitors are doing and not the why? Ask yourself about every stat you come across ‘what action can I take?’ If the answer is none then park it, it may spark ideas in the future.
7. Believing stats. See a platform giving you information? What are they basing that on? How have they calculated that? Is that relevant? For example, Facebook was taken to court by advertisers for stating that a 3-second video watch was a view and therefore relevant. It isn’t. Question what each platform gives you, test the stats and make up your mind to pursue or not pursue.
8. Don’t think because you have a massive following on a platform it means anything. We call these ‘vanity stats.’ You may have 10,000 followers on Facebook, how many of them are doing anything? It is better to have 10 email addresses from people that open your email than a massive following who don’t engage.
9. Adding dozens of affiliate links to your website.
10. Googling for marketing ideas. Don’t do that. Get someone who knows stuff to help. It is a minefield, you can’t learn everything, talk to someone who knows and has done stuff.
I could go on about the good and the bad. I am sure at least half of these ideas will make you successful online and some others will save you time and money.
About Conversion Detectives
Conversion Detectives is a full service digital marketing agency in Hertfordshire.
We find the best quality traffic for your website and convert more of that traffic into sales or sales leads.
Services
Digital Marketing Strategy | Creative Content Marketing | Email Marketing |
Lead Generation | Content Strategy | Social Media Marketing |
Video Marketing | SEO (Basics) | SEM |
Shopify Marketing