How to Turn Your Website into a Sales Tool

Attracting new customers to your business can take some finesse. Knowing what your audience is looking for, how to deliver it and when to send it out is the formula we’re all trying to figure out. Below we’re going to combine 2 different methodologies to achieve this: inbound marketing & sales funnel optimization.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing methodology is a business strategy that attracts customers through personalized content that is tailored to the customers needs. Instead of trying to grab your audience’s attention through continued advertisements and promotions, inbound marketing focuses on your customers problems and offers solutions.

Inbound can be broken down into these 2 steps:

1. Understanding what your client’s wants & needs.
   
2. Creating meaningful content that fills those needs.

Understanding your client’s needs

When trying to understand what your client’s want, most marketing agencies would start by creating a few buyer personas. While this can be extremely helpful, most small businesses & newer businesses struggle with picturing their ideal client’s behavior.

There’s a few methods we use regularly for our clients to help determine their customer’s needs:

• Competitor research: discover what others are doing in your space & fill a similar need.
• Search analysis: Google Trends & Keyword Tools like this one can help you see what people are searching for online.
• Asking your current customers “what are your biggest pain points when working with us / competitors?”

Creating meaningful content

Powered with that information, your next step is to provide the answers to your customer’s needs.

You don’t need to give away all of your trade secrets, but to be able to answer some simple questions from your customers can build trust in your business & help them see your team as experts in the field.

Writing blog posts, filming a quick Q&A video, and creating small graphics can all be useful for your customers. These pieces of content will be why your customer visits your website, so make sure they answer their questions & actually help the customer.

Inbound marketing is effective because it is based on exactly what your audience is looking for. This works best when your business is producing high quality content that your audience wants to engage with.

Sales Funnel Optimization

Once you start creating meaningful content & gaining visitors, the next step is to push those visitors into taking a step towards a sale.

While there’s a ton to consider here, let’s start with a quick overview:

1. Get visitors to your website.
2. Track your website visitors through analytics.
3. Design effective landing pages that focus on a traceable Call to Action.
4. Review how those visitors interacted & optimize through small changes.

Getting visitors to your website

At this point, you’ve created some amazing content.
Unfortunately, even if you developed the cure for Cancer, it doesn’t mean much if no one has seen it.

If your website & social following don’t have a large audience already, you will need to find creative ways to get your content in front of people.
Consider an email newsletter, posting to social media channels, and starting paid advertising to attract attention.

Eventually when you have a sizable following, you might not need to work as hard to gain visitors – but in the meantime, it will take effort to get your content to viewers.

Track visitors through analytics

In order to understand how users are interacting on your website, you need to set up analytics software that will track your user’s activity.

Google Analytics is the most popular (and free) analytics software available, and it’s fairly easy to set up on any website. Even just understanding general user activity is helpful: bounce rates, time on page, your most popular pages, etc.

It’s important to set up “Key Events” inside of your tracking software that focus on your next step of your sales process: a phone call, form submission, etc. This will help you understand what pages on your website are actually bringing in customers.

Design effective landing pages

Ideally, you’ve created content for your customers that’s easy to place into your website: a blog post, video, or a pdf. When we say “landing page”, we just mean the page on your website that visitors first come to.

We want to make that content easy for potential customers to access. Again, our goal isn’t to monetize this content, so don’t place it behind a paywall. We want customers to access this content & build their trust in you as a provider.

There’s several factors that make a great landing page for your content:

• Clean, straightforward design
• Obvious buttons to view, download, or access the information
• Images or video with friendly faces or product demonstrations

Reviewing visitor activity

Once your tracking software is set up & you are bringing traffic to the website, now is the time to see if your hard work is paying off.

You might not see sales right away. Though you might see an increase in traffic to your website from your ads or marketing efforts. That gives us information we can use to optimize the process.

For example:

• If you aren’t seeing many clicks on your ads or response to your marketing, then the content of your ads likely need some work.
• If you see a ton of traffic to the website from your ads or marketing but those visitors are leaving quickly, your landing page or your content likely needs some work.
• If you see visitors to your website but they aren’t taking steps towards a sale, then your call to action likely needs some work.

Once you know where visitors are stopping, you can learn what you need to improve to better make a sale. Keep making optimizations & seeing what performs better over time. This is just scratching the surface on what you can learn from your visitors through analytics.