Ok, let’s be honest. Most of us use social media at least once a day. Many of us use it a few times every hour even! Did you know you didn’t have much of a chance resisting apps like Facebook, Pinterest and others once you started using them? It wasn’t your fault though. You didn’t know that an actual addiction was developing. Yeah, you heard that correctly, an addiction!
Whether intentionally designed or not, many social media apps actually cause an habitual addiction to occur. These apps are habit forming in our brains. They use external triggers like an email, a “Like”, or new followers to trigger an internal response or an actions from us. That action has a reward of some type for us internally which creates a greater commitment to it. These rewards cause actual chemical reactions in our brain which affect our response to them. Over time, as more and more rewards occur, we habitually begin looking for those external responses and start checking those apps or interacting with them in order to receive the reward. Very “Pavlovian” in it’s design, we press the bar, we get a treat.
Now, its obviously not like a drug that you can’t escape, but you begin questioning how you could ever live without that app. How could you ever do business without it? How could you ever keep up with you friends? These apps are habit forming over time. If you are checking these apps daily, challenge yourself to go a full week without even peeking to see if you don’t go a little crazy wanting to check in. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t make it that long myself.
Everyone knows its great to have a website, but if all you do is build a website and take email, you have not kept up with the changes that will have a big impact on growing your business.
When I first started building websites in 1994, getting people to visit your website wasn’t hard as there wasn’t that many people online and everyone was just hopping from one site to another. We all thought it was cool, but the traffic was useless and the sites were really, REALLY ugly. Companies would put contact forms and feedback forms on their sites and thought it would bring business. But the smart companies started to figure out they could create email campaigns to drive targeted visitors that were more likely to buy something. Then the race really took off as young start-ups were suddenly taking on legacy brick and mortar Goliaths in their industries.
The days when you could simply outsource the building of a website and plopping it online in the hopes of being successful are gone. Young start-ups these days can no longer compete with the established companies without finding a really unique niche and exploiting it till a big fish decides its time to buy. It takes a dedicated marketing team and strategy to have any hope of breaking through the noise and clutter of competitors.
An online marketing strategy will be unique to each company. Of course these days an online marketing strategy can probably be considered THE marketing strategy for any company under 5,000 employees. There are a number of common elements that have to be addressed in an online marketing strategy, but using them will be unique to each company.
Here is a quick breakdown of components in a great online strategy.
- Social media. Unless you been hiding under a rock, you know you have to have a social media strategy that fully embraces peer to peer interaction with an online audience. Social media has been shown to drive up to 30% and more traffic to websites that are effectively using it. It’s not hard, just takes a lot of work.
- Email campaigns. A staple marketing tool for online marketing, it still ranks as one of the top marketing tools for reaching an audience.
- Content development. Having great content is at the core of your success online. Without it, a website is nothing more than fluff. Content is no longer text, but consists of infographics, white papers and ebooks, webinars, case studies and much more. These are assets the marketing and sales teams need in order to do their jobs effectively.
- Content Marketing. Once you have content, you have to have a strategy for getting it in the hands of your potential audience and enabling them to share it with others.
- Search Engine Ranking. Let’s face it, these days if you don’t rank well and can’t be found in search engines, your organizations may as well not exist. Ranking well is a combination of having great content and other sites linking to that content. Starting to see a pattern here?
- Search Engine Marketing. If you have a for profit business, unless everyone already wants your product, you need a budget for spending on pay per click. This can easily generate a large percentage of your leads if done well. But like any of these items, it has it’s own strategies and an entire industry built around it.
- Blogger & Media Relations. You need other people talking about you. There are millions of bloggers out there and probably several in your own company. You need to be able to leverage the traditional media outlets as well as the bloggers to talk about your organization. This feeds awareness as well as those extra links your site badly needs.
- Testing Strategy. In my almost 20 years of web development and marketing, I’ve often found most executives think their websites work great. But I’ve never found a website that couldn’t be significantly improved to drive more visitors and a greater number of leads simply by testing a wide variety of elements on their websites and online campaigns. Every organization must adopt a strategy of perpetual testing and change with their website in order to grow the business.
- Analytics. Every company needs to know what is going on with their website in terms of numbers. Otherwise, its impossible to make anything but an educated guess as to what’s actually going on if you’re going to make improvements. Learn how to understand web analytics, conversion analytics, and campaign stats to determine what is effective and what isn’t.
It’s rather daunting to consider just what it takes to really compete online. Companies that can do it will beat their less agile competition and develop a much greater understanding of their customers over time.
Simple Conversion Strategies
Can your website convert traffic into customers and fans? If your website isn’t converting at a minimum of 5-10% of your traffic into potential customers, then something is wrong.
1 in 10 website visitors should be filling out a form or taking some type of action on your website. If you think you don’t need forms or some type of conversion action on your website, then you are doing something wrong. I haven’t seen a business yet that doesn’t need forms for one reason or another.
Let’s look at a some simple strategies that a good website can follow to increase it’s conversion rate.
- Understand the visitor. You need to look at who is coming to your website. Not just the people you want to visit, but everyone. To understand your visiting audience, take a look at the sites they come from, what keywords they searched on, where they are geographically and what content they interact with. What you may find is that a large percentage are bouncing after a few seconds. This could mean you are doing a good job of driving the wrong traffic or that your website doesn’t match what people were expecting. Know who you want to visit your site and go after that audience.
- Funnel toward the conversion. Look at the traffic coming to your website to understand the paths that people take throu your site. Then make sure that your conversion action can easily be found and matches the content on that page, otherwise you will be asking them to take the wrong action and lower your chance to convert.
- Be worthy of a conversion. Is the asset you are providing behind the conversion useful to the visitor? Does it help them somehow in their daily life or job? Is it with the person giving up their personal information and increasing the amount of email they receive and a potential sales call if they give you their information?
- Provide what is promised. You only have one chance with most visitors filling out a form. Make it a great experience and give them what they gave up their privacy for. Don’t make your visitor jump through extra hurdles to get what they wanted.
- Be helpful. Always send a confirmation email that contains instructions and appropriate links to continue to do business with you. They were willing to give some info, go above and beyond by giving more than they asked for. Turn them into impressed fans right from the start.
If you follow these five simple strategies, then any website can convert at a much better rate and begin moving into more advanced conversion improving techniques.
Tactics to Improve Form Conversions
Can you claim you’ve done everything possible to improve the conversion rates on your website? Namely, the percentage of people visiting your site that actually fill out a form. Let’s face it, most people do not want to fill out any kind of form on your website, but there are a number of things you can do to improve the odds of someone filling out a form.
What are some of the top reasons people don’t want to fill out a form?
- Don’t want to be called. Whether you have a active sales force or not, the impression people have is that some sales person is going to pester them endlessly if they fill out a form.
- Don’t want spam. We both know you don’t spam people, but your visitors don’t know that.
- Don’t have time. Some forms are multiple pages long. People already don’t want to fallout your form, why put more obstacles in their way?
- Not really that interested. Unless you are totally awesome, this is going to be 90% of your visiting audience.
So if those are the primary reasons people don’t fill out your forms, what are some of the things you can look out to make people more likely to fill them out?
Top Ten Tactics to Improve Conversion Rate
- Don’t use a plain old contact form. Give people value for giving you their information. It may be a white paper, webinar, ebook, newsletter, free advice or stuff. Your objective is to create value for your visitors and having good things to give them for filling out forms is an incentive to take the next step.
- Multiple points of conversion. Give people multiple reasons to contact you. Provide several of the above items to help drive visitors and conversions.
- Use Short forms. The shorter the form is the likelier you are to have a conversion. for instance, if you don’t need a persons physical address for a follow up email or call, don’t ask. Just eliminating the address can cut down on 4 fields of information that keeps people away.
- Support all platforms. Due to the growth of mobile devices, it is expected that more people will be connecting with your site on these than on a desktop in the very near future. Make sure your forms are easy to use on mobile devices or you may be missing a big portion of your visitors.
- Don’t use drop down form fields. Through lots of testing, I’ve found in every case that drop down fields on forms are the point at which people stop entering information. It doesn’t seem to matter what is in the drop down box, it kills conversions. Instead, use a radio box or check box. The opposite of this is true for forms shown to mobile visitors. On phones and tablets, the drop down works better than the radio and check box because it is easier to click.
- If its not required, don’t ask. If you don’t need the information to start a conversation, don’t ask for it. I’ve seen improvements in form conversion by 30% and more simply by removing a few fields.
- Enable people to share the goodness. If the form is promoting a great ebook, white paper or webinar, be sure to add social media like and share buttons on the form and the thank you page. This can help drive additional traffic and conversions from your customers inner circles.
- Test, test, test. If you aren’t already, test your forms to make sure they are working correctly and efficiently. Use an inexpensive tool like Clicktale.com to test the form and Google Optimizer to test variations of the form against each other. Dong regular A/B testing is critical for any website.
- Follow up with that email. All of your forms should be capable of sending an autoresponder. It shouldn’t be some basic thank you, but make it personal and tell them what next steps you’ll be taking.
- Nurture that conversion. After that initial email. Follow up with an actual contact, but if it is not a B level lead like a white paper or webinar, send them additional related material one, two and three weeks after than drives additional conversions if possible.
There are many other items that help drive conversions on forms, but as a strategy, just implementing regular testing of different form designs and form copy can significantly improve the conversion rate.
I would love to hear other suggestions you may have that you’ve used to improve your conversion rate.
Engaging and Reaching the Mobile Youth
Why is it that some churches, regardless of size, are either great at reaching teens and early adults or they just never seem able to connect? I believe it comes down to having strong leaders that they can identify with, trust and follow.
The needs of this age group have never really changed over the years, but the way they fulfill those needs certainly has changed dramatically. Their decision to follow someone are driven primarily by two questions.
- How will you help me belong?
- How will you help me be significant?
This group of young adults are extremely wired and mobile. They spend more time in online social circles than any other place. They are heavily influenced by people in these circles that have the most power and voice. They use these tools as to communicate, but they also use them as weapons, as powerful ways to affect change, to get around the “system”, to motivate others and as a main source of entertainment.
A common marketing practice in social media is to go where the people are. To hang out with them and listen to what they have to say. Church youth leaders also must embrace the mobile tools out there and engage people where they are. If a leader can’t do this, they are typically viewed as irrelevant to this age group.
A recent report from MobileYouth that studies the behaviors of teens and young adults states that not every age group or gender is connected in the same way, but there is a group that is that seems to affect the behavior of the less connected. These change agents are able to use their social currency to move and shape the local cultures around them, whether they realize it or not. By focusing on this small set of youth, you are able to affect a much wider audience of followers. But simply being a loudspeaker to this group is not effective.
The tactics for interacting with this group are relatively simple, but take time.
- Engage with them. This is simple enough. No one wants to be ignored. They have a voice, sometimes loud, sometimes silent, but both can be powerful. Get to know them and interact regularly. This can be a challenge, but don’t give up.
- Understand the lingo. Notice I didn’t say speak their language, but understand it. If you aren’t I the same age group you’ll just appear fake, but you still need to understand what they are telling you.
- Earn their attention. If you aren’t relevant on a regular basis, if you don’t engage and interact, if you don’t go to bat for them, you won’t be attractive.
- Be an authority. Leaders are rare these days. Great leaders even more so. Don’t be bossy, but be a leader that can serve and inspire this generation.
- Empower and partner with them. This age group is at various stages of testing their wings. Give them responsibility to succeed and fail. Stand along side them as Guiding partners and let them have the credit and failure. Teach them to move past the failure and celebrate when the succeed.
- Create a sense of belonging. Everyone wants to belong, but not necessarily to the same group. Create environments and projects that allow for multiple types of groups that can work together and independently while recognizing each others strengths. Help the socially challenged find ways to be embraced and participate. Empower the leaders to look beyond the stereotypes and embrace true servant leadership.
How engaged is your organization with teens and young adults? Is your church engaging daily or is it just sending out announcements for the weekly Bible study? If you’re just doing the basics, maybe its time to rethink how you communicate.
