Got Website Traffic, Great! Now What?

You have a website! Great. You have traffic to your website (you know it because you’ve installed Google Analytics or something similar)! Wonderful.  You are getting conversions (sales, votes, donations or a prospect’s data)! Hardly? Ouch! read on.

99% of the time someone visits a website for the first time, they are not ready to make a purchase, vote for you, donate money to your cause or give you their data.   That’s just a fact.  So, it’s no wonder that, even though you’ve done your homework and have optimized your site for search engines, kept a constant flow of good content on social media sites and a blog going, you are not getting the conversions that you’d like.  Having a phone number on your site or a “contact us” form is not enough.  But most people don’t realize this.  And, if they do, they don’t want to take the necessary steps to fix the problem because they believe it’ll take too much time, money and effort to get what you want.

Sadly, they are right.  Except for one thing.  It doesn’t have to cost too much money.  In fact, if you have the staff to help you generate engaging, entertaining or educational content it should not cost you much money to get more people to convert on your site!  It will, however, take time an effort on your part and that of your staff’s.  But the time and effort can be spread across everyone that works in your company, and I mean EVERYONE, so the impact on productivity and salaries should be minimal.

Welcome to Content Marketing, the most cost-efficient way of getting your conversion goals on track and even surpassing them, if you get really good at it.  But, first things first, you have traffic, which means you’ve either invested a lot of money on digital media or you’ve got a great thing going on the social media and blogging front.  Now, how do you get that traffic to convert?  First, you’ve got to turn that traffic into leads. Then, you’ve got to nurture those leads until you have enough pertinent and personalized information about that person to convert him or her into a potential customer. Finally, if you’ve played your content marketing cards right, you, or your sales team, will be armed with enough information contact that potential customer directly and make the sale.  It is very important that you don’t contact them immediately, but only when it is the right time or, more precisely, the right stage in the buying cycle. To do all this, first you have to offer them something that is worth giving you their basic information-a name and an email address- so that you can follow up with them.

So, if you sell high-end widows and doors and customers find your website easily, then offer to share something with them that will help them be better educated about windows and doors, say, for extreme weather conditions.  BUT, don’t just give that up without getting something in return- after all, you are the expert on high-end doors and windows and what you have to say is truly valuable.  So create a landing page where your potential customer can download the document if they give you their name, an email address and answer three simple, multiple choice questions, such as 1) What size home are you planning to build? 2) When do you plan to build? and 3) Where is the location of the house. Once they answer and they download your document, bingo! You have a lead.

Now it’s time to nurture that lead.  Depending on the answers you receive, try to create content that relates to their answers, for instance, if they answered that they are planning to build in the Miami beach are, create a document, or white paper- on hurricane preparedness and the types of windows that can handle this extreme weather situations.  Don’t push your brand as much as how they are built on this document so that the reader does not feel that you are trying to sell them something but educate them on a need they actually have or will have.  Send them an email with a link to a landing page where they’ll be able to download the documents.  Since you know who they are and you have their email, all you have to do in this landing page is for more information like, 1) What style of home are they planning on building or 2) have they selected an architect for the project.  There are many different that can be asked without all the sales pressure.  The customer will likely begin to feel that you are trying to understand him- which you are- and not only wanting to sell something to him or her.

You can do this a couple more times and then, based on the answers to your questions, you’ll know if it is a qualified lead, you turn the information over to your sales team and let them close the sale.

Of course, as I mentioned before, this process takes time but little money.  If you want to make it easier on yourself, and your web team and sales team, you can purchase an inbound marketing software as a service such as HubSpot and, before you know it, you’ll have more qualified leads than you’ll know what to do with.. not really, but you get the idea.

I’m Lalo Wakefield, a Freelance Hispanic Creative Director and Hispanic Marketing consultant.  I help General Marketing agencies expand their services to include Hispanic Marketing and I help Traditional Hispanic agencies enter the Digital Marketing arena, creatively and strategically.