Category: SEO

When it comes to sales, you may feel as if you’re tackling the Tardis. It can be completely mind blowing. But, that doesn’t mean you have to suck at sales for the rest of your life. In fact, it means quite the opposite. It may just be that you need to be pointed in the right direction and helped along your way a bit. If that’s the case, you’re going to going to need to work on getting your sales process right. If you don’t, you may find that your business struggles to progress and that you’re not going to grow at the rate that you hoped. So, to nail it the first time around, here are the five steps that you need to take.

Step One: Research

First of all, before you can take any active steps, you’re going to want to do your research. Right now, you know that your sales process just isn’t working. But you may not know why. So, research can help with that. You’re going to want to create a user-friendly website that has a conversion focused sales funnel. So, you need to find examples of other sites that do it well. You may even want to look out for any results that other businesses have published online about their successful sales processes.

Step Two: Create

With some research behind you, you can now think about creating the perfect sales funnel on your website. To do this, you’re going to need to design and code the pages that your customers will visit as a part of the sales process. This can be as simple as a landing page with an opt-in point, or something more complex. Using your research, you should have a rough idea what will work best for you.

Step Three: Split Test

To find out if your ideal design is working for you, you may want to think about doing a split test. This will involve using two different designs to see which works the best. So, if you were stuck between a few different ideas, it’s always worth trying two. Then, you can compare the results that you get for each to see which is the best to go with.

Step Four: Refine

Next, you’re then going to want to refine your designs, and the sales funnel itself. Based on the results that you got from split testing, you should be able to create one clear design that combines the best and most successful pieces of both – both in terms of the overall design, and the technical sales process too.

Step Five: React

And finally, you’re also going to want to make sure that you’re reacting on a regular basis. It’s important to use data if you want to improve your sales because it will get you the results you want. You should regularly review your analytics to discover where your customers are dropping off during the sales funnel. Then, you can work on improving it so that they convert from prospects into customers.

Marketing is an excellent way to increase sales and build a reputable brand. There is only one problem: it’s hard to quantify the results. After all, it isn’t easy to say whether a sales increase were a result of your strategy or another, simpler reason. As a result, some businesses are in the market of guessing and hoping for the best. If this doesn’t sound like a good plan, there are solutions. These solutions involve tracking your marketing strategy to understand its effectiveness, and here is how to do it.

Customer Feedback

Customers are lots of things, but they aren’t liars. In fact, they are brutally honest even if they are talking face to face with a supplier. Although this is scary, it is also a fantastic resource to help codify success. By simply asking them for their opinion, you can figure out whether the strategy was a hit or a dud. And, quantitative research couldn’t be easier. All you need to do is stop passers-by and ask them a question, or get them to fill in a short questionnaire. It’s basic, yet it is very effective.

New Vs Returning Users

Overall, you need both the new and returning website user numbers to be high. The reason is that it indicates two things. The first is that your plan is effective enough to make new customers aware of your brand. As far as marketing is concerned, that is the main goal. Secondly, it shows that your website is appealing and functional enough to keep them coming back for more. And, that is vital if you want to build a solid customer base. After all, you don’t want to spend lots of time creating an amazing marketing strategy to lose it when people visit the site.

Big Data Analysis

Big data is incredibly popular in 2017 and for a good reason. Simply put, using QA metrics and other formats is the best way to gauge success. As long as you know how to read the numbers, the answers are there in the data for everyone to see. Once you translate it, you can then transform or tweak your marketing depending on which one is the most necessary. Google Analytics started the trend, and it shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. If you don’t get on board, you may miss the train.

Growth Rate

Although different factors affect growth rate, a business can’t expand without great marketing. There is just too much competition nowadays for a company to survive and stand out from the crowd. As such, it is quite okay to generalize about the success of your strategy even if you don’t have the numbers. It is by no means the only way to go about it, especially when you have analytic metrics and quantitative research. Still, the firm’s rate of growth is a good sign that everything is going in the right direction.

Now that you have the tools, there is no reason not to track your marketing success.

Most businesses use content marketing as part of their advertising strategy. In fact, some estimates suggest that as many as between 77 and 94 percent of all businesses use content marketing regularly. However, I’m willing to bet that only a small fraction of those companies are getting significant results from their efforts.

You see, although content marketing can undoubtedly be a great way to drive traffic and make sales, most companies are making rookie mistakes that stop them from seeing success. So, if you’re using online marketing and it isn’t helping you as much as you think it could check out these common reasons why it might be failing for you:

You Have No Strategy in Place

You can’t just create content and expect people to flock to your website, blog or store – you have to have a strategy in place. You need to experiment, see what works and what doesn’t and put a plan in place to make things better. Just having a plan in place could make all the difference between content that converts and content that goes largely ignored.

You Haven’t Invested in Your Website

No matter how good your content is if you haven’t spent the same amount of time investing in your website, whether by purchasing your own domain from www.wizzhosting.co.uk, developing an attractive theme, or making your website simple to use, you simply aren’t going to get the kind of results you’d expect. So, as well as investing in content, spend a bit of money improving your website, and you may be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Your Content Isn’t Inspiring

Just writing any old content, even if it features all the right keywords to, in theory, drive traffic your way, isn’t good enough. If you want to not only drive more traffic to your website but encourage more people to buy your goods and services, your content needs to be good. It should compel, inspire, inform or entertain your readers so that they’re convinced to make a purchase and more than happy to come back and read some more or sign up to your newsletter.

You Don’t Promote Your Content

If you’re already running a hugely successful business or you’re posting content on one of the planet’s top blogs, you might not have to do much to promote your content, but for everyone else, it is vital. Post links on Twitter and Facebook, write guest posts, send out emails and do anything else you can to spread the word about your latest piece of writing if you want to see spectacular results.

You’re in a Difficult Niche

Sometimes, you might not be doing anything wrong at all. It might just be that you’ve chosen to operate in a difficult niche where the number of people who’d be interested in reading your stuff is limited, or your target audience doesn’t get online much. If this is the case, you’ll have to work a lot harder to break through and get lots of readers, perhaps by combining your niche with a more popular related one, but it is possible, so don’t give up.

You’re Competing Against a Giant

Again, if you’re doing everything right, your content could still fail if you’re forced to go up against a huge competitor. For example, say you were to start producing your own brand of cola. How do you think you’d fare against Coca Cola and their billions? Probably not that well, UNLESS, you can offer something unique. So, if this is a problem you’re facing, don’t be afraid to be quirky or market your product from a  new angle. Maybe you could highlight the superior ethics of your product or the fact that you use organic ingredients. There’s always a market for things like that; it’s just a matter of working out what your USP is and emphasizing it in your content.

You Haven’t Been Marketing Long Enough

Even some of the biggest internet marketers like the owner of https://problogger.com/ weren’t overnight successes. They had to do the work and then wait patiently for the results to roll in. The thing about content marketing is that it takes time. It can take months for your content to get attention, so you need to be patient. If you keep doing all the right things, it will happen eventually, and you will see your bottom line begin to bulge.

Your SEO Knowledge is Poor

If you don’t know how to optimize your content for search engines, no one is going to be able to find it, and that means, no matter how good it is, you won’t see any results from it. So, either learn SEO or hire an expert if you feel that could be where your problem lies.