All Posts
It’s that time of year when giving is on many of our minds. These gifts are our way of saying thank you for your continued support and patronage.They include a popular resource from us, as well as great tools and apps that are all things we use ourselves. We hope you make great use of these and if you have any questions please feel free to contact us.
Starting in January we will be including some free items that we can’t wait to tell you about, but also can’t wait to hear back from you on how you’re using them and gaining more success with your business.
All Posts, Marketing
You may have read headlines or seen references to lead conversions and if you’re not sure what this means or even where to start, this article is for you.
What is a Conversion
A conversion is when a potential customer has engaged with your brand or business in some form, and then proceeded to take an action. That action may be signing up for a mailing list, purchasing an item, followed you on a social platform, or even subscribed. The end result is whatever outcome you’d like for your potential customers to do. So take a minute and consider any marketing efforts you’re currently doing, like maybe you have a special deal on your website? A recent social media post? An email newsletter with links to videos or a survey? The options are endless, but still there is a measurable metric that will ultimately be calculated for the amount of potential customers/leads that you’ll be looking to attract.
What is a Lead
Simply put, a lead is a person who has interest in your product or service that can make a decision about buying. There’s a difference between people looking to kick tires, but don’t have authority to actually make a purchase. The conversation or content to those information seekers should differentiate them from their counterparts or management who are able to make purchasing decisions. A lot of times we create content that’s like spaghetti on the wall with the hopes that something speaks to the right person amongst all the mess on the wall. Truth be told, no one likes a mess, let alone want to eat off a wall.
How to Calculate Your Conversion Rate
Every business is different with regards to their prices for their products and/or services. So while we’re going to talk about conversion rates, I would suggest that you sit with your team and decide what is an acceptable goal that is something your business isn’t complacent with but is within attainable number.
Ok so essentially to the formula for calculating your conversion ratio is: Conversion Ratio = Number of Confirmed Sales/Action, Divided by the Total Number of Leads Multiplied by 100. A common conversion rate is anywhere from 10-20%. When you step back and think about it, it’s a numbers game. The more leads you have the more potential sales you should have which ultimately boosts your bottom line.
If in a week you are able to attract 200 leads and 20 of them convert, that gives you a 10% Conversion Rate. The other piece to this with your business is to see how consistent you are with your metrics. Are you consistently getting 200 leads? What are the marketing methods your using to attract those leads? If you were to double those efforts or marketing budget, would that also double the amount of leads? Could there be other marketing efforts through other channels and platforms that you can also track and measure to perform the same?
One last thing to point out here is that by doing this exercise, you can also calculate your cost per customer. This is called Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Since you know how many customers or leads you’re getting from the above equation, you’ll need to know how much it costs for your marketing efforts. This includes but isn’t limited to cost for flyers, business cards, ad-spend on social media platforms, Google Ad campaigns, article boosting and promoting, and more. Count all of your marketing costs up and divide that by the number of confirmed customers/sales. For example, if my monthly marketing costs is $1,000, and our business is averaging 100 customers a month, well my CAC is $10 or every new customer costs me $10. Now if each new customer purchases a product or service at least say $200, then my average sales for those same 100 customers will gross us $20,000. And again, if it only costs me $10 for each new customer, wouldn’t you say that’s a worthwhile budget and spending plan?
If you or your business needs help with formulating your conversion rate or you’d like ways to boost your metrics, feel free to contact us because we’d love to help.
Business Strategy, Web Design
Define Your Goal(s)
It’s important to have a an accepted end point that you and your team share, and then you can build the roadmap to how to achieve it. Having clear and defined goals help to ensure the success of your efforts with the redesign. It also will bring into scope what content, functions, specific designs, and other elements that will be required and allow you to break each goal down into silos with milestones and tasks.
Create Attractive Content For Your Audience
The best content is content made for specific individuals. The idea of generalized media with a spaghetti on the wall approach is meaningless and a waste of time (and money). So instead, do some research on what your custom avatar is challenged with and how your MVP is going to address their issue(s). You’ll want to lead with that on your home page, then provide proof of concepts, examples, case studies, and testimonials. If you have some big partnerships or known influencers, leverage their contributions and feedback as well. All of these can greatly help change a potential client/customer from kicking tires to frantically looking for a BUY NOW button.
Design For Mobile Use
The data shows that more websites are viewed on a mobile device over desktops. Yes widescreen monitors are nice and I’m sure your brand graphics could look amazing on them. But going back to the goals, what is the main function your online visitors are expected to want to do? Are they mainly going to pull up your website to see graphics and ponies scroll across the screen in a parallax or slider? Is that going to make them more inclined to use your call to actions or sign ups? If so and you can make all that work on a mobile device using average network speeds, go for it all. Otherwise it may be worth to disable some elements that are useful on the desktop but not necessary for a mobile experience so that your content loads even faster and satisfies the ever dwindling patience of today’s society.
Make The Navigation Flow Easy
A hamburger menu is those three lines at the top corner of the website – on mobile – that help visitors click to show a full menu of pages and subpages to navigate or jump to. If your site doesn’t have this as a feature, you’ll certainly want to incorporate it. Being responsive and Google Mobile Friends is also key for SEO purposes and for Accessibility. Those are the technical, but let’s also take a second to consider how your visitors “should” be navigating from page to page like as if they were reading a book. Will you have landing pages optimized with content that you’ll be using ads and retargeting so that when visitors do “click” and get to your landing page(s), they’re offered a seemless experience and then can easily tell what their next steps should be? Are large buttons and large arrows necessary? Or do images alongside content helping the eye navigate along a page clear interaction points shown. PRO TIP: On your current website, install a Heat Map so that you can see how and what people are using their mouse and spending time on for each page on your website.
Create Multiple Landing Page With Specific Strategies
I’ve hinted about landing pages above, but let’s talk a bit more about it here. Landing pages serve singular purposes, and that’s to provide information on a product or service with a clear and sometimes repeated offering or call to action. The normal top or side page navigation menus are not aways displayed because we’re hoping to keep the visitor focused on just what they see on the page. There may be an introductory video, infogrpaphic, product images, before and after photos, you name it. All of these along with supporting text that better describes a need or challenge that the visitor can have solved by taking another step. Maybe that’s to sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product, subscribe to a newsletter or mailing list. There’s no limit on the amount of content needed on each of your landing pages or a limit on how many landing pages you can or should create. Having multiple can help with A/B testing, segmenting your audience, providing variations for your digital marketing ad traffic and audience and more. Consider your landing page almost like a deal closer that can speak to anyone in your target audience, but in a specific way that they’ll understand individually and appreciate.
I hope that you found these points useful and relevant if you’re going through or planning a redesign with your company website. Each business is different and there are many other things to consider. If you’d like help with a strategy for your own redesign be sure to contact us.
Marketing, Social Media
Sometimes it can be really tough to think about what you’re going to post or publish next for your business or brand. Is it photo, a graphic, a short video, a long video, or none of those? Let’s simplify it down to just three things to consider: Entertain, Enlighten, Educate
Can Your Post Entertain Your Audience?
Most social media platforms have timelines filled with posts that are funny, amusing, and whimsical. If what your organization has to offer can see trends in those spaces and ride the wave, you certainly should. One big advantage is making your products, services, or brand relatable. We can’t ignore the fact that Tik Tok is one of, if not the biggest social network. A lot of of posts on there are short skits, dance challenges, and more. By studying some of those posts that seem to garner the most interactions, think of ways you can create posts in the same likeness yet with a twist using one of products. Imagine a skit where a child is digging through a cereal box looking for the toy that should be inside, and instead gets a package that is your product? Better yet, knowing that your product isn’t a toy, recording the child’s disappointed reaction but then an older family member swooping in and grabbing it with laughter from the child as it is something they would really appreciate. My point is, the effect examples are already there. The scripts are already written. You just have to slightly modify your approach so that your contribution to the space is unique yet familiar.
Can Your Post Enlighten Your Audience?
When you think about providing insight to something that is not widely known, you can instantly become captivating. Whether it’s a statistic of the amount of wild boars that are active in an local community where people have been trying to figure out why their rose gardens and flower beds and trashed night to night, or the tangible benefits to the morning rush-hour by more companies adopting work-from-home policies; it’s a piece of information that some of your audience would be happy to know and probably take and brag about to their friends and colleagues. Another example, did you know that certain crystals offer therapeutic properties by holding some or by just having them on your desk or night stand? Welp, neither did I, but a friend of mine Cheryl (check out her Instagram Page here) enlightened us with her daily posts with different crystals and how they can be beneficial and how to use them that we bough a few. Cheryl had a couple of posts that seemed to be speaking to us and resonated to where we felt we needed to check this out, and therefore we were enlightened.
Can Your Post Educate Your Audience?
How many times have you seen posts that say, “on this day, I learned….” or “how come no one ever told me…” We love learning something new. Especially when it’s in a space that we may not have expected. For example, when we think of a traditional college course, in your mind you’re already thinking about a boring lecture and pages and pages of notes and studying. Yes you’ll learn plenty, but no where near as fun as scrolling through your social feed and stopping on a peculiar short video of someone removing a stain from their car seat using household items that you probably also own. With slight disbelief you continue watching eagerly hoping that they actually clear that stain, and when they do you quickly share the post and head to your kitchen cabinet and dash to your car to try what you’ve just learned. Because I wasn’t necessarily expecting to learn something new, when I do, and it’s something that I actually needed it’s a double bonus. So how can your product or service create a similar moment for an audience that may be unsuspecting that you’re post was about to change their life?
So how will you use these three pillars with your business or organization and your social media properties? Would love to hear about it, so drop us a line when you do.
Business Strategy, Marketing, Social Media
I’m not sure about you, but I’ve been impatiently waiting for a new social media offering that isn’t Facebook. While I know that millions of people are active on all of the arms and legs of this giant, I’ve had fatigue for a couple of years now. But we can get into that another time. Clubhouse is a breathe of fresh air.
Audio Only & Exclusivity
One of the biggest and more unique features is that it is audio only. Where video is still a powerhouse, audio has been mainly used for podcasts. Though that sector is still booming, live audio is relatively new. So Clubhouse is an invite only social app and this is different when compared to most where anyone can get on (including bots). With this, invites are tracked by who invited you. And your invites are limited at first but grow with your engagement and prolonged use. This makes for a more exclusive feeling when you launch the app and it furthers that by curating rooms in your feed based on who you follow and interact with most. It helps to make it easier and quicker to jump right into a room and join a conversation.
Conversations & Stages
Joining a room is easy, but the key is to get up on stage. Not all rooms allow for everyone to be brought up on stage. So again, some exclusivity being exercised again. This is a good thing because it allows for room moderators to ensure whomever is going to be on stage is someone who will add value to the conversation. If you happen to notice people’s microphone icon go on and off repeatedly, that means they’re applauding what the speaker is saying.
Networking & Growth Opportunities
This is probably the biggest advantage to early adopters of this platform. As it is very organic right now, most of the interactions you’ll have will land you follows. It’s advantageous for your to follow others as well because you’ll get notifications of rooms that they enter as well as rooms they create. If they’re active with getting up on stages, chances are they’ll also get you on stage too. And being up there providing value to the crowd is where you always want to be when you put time into this app in my opinion. Very much like any other public opportunity, you’ll want to position yourself as an SME (Subject Matter Expert), that others will quickly come to regard you as such and seek you for more insight.
Another key element here is to create your own rooms, invite others to join you, and do this on a consistent basis. I’ve seen people do daily ones on open ended topics like a Lunch & Learn. Those are great because you’re not locked into a singular topic or stressed to think of a new topic for each day/room session. I’ve included screenshots on how to create and schedule a room. I found it hard at first to figure out so I figured I’d share.
Hope to see you on there!
