Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was originally published on the Tatum Marketing Technology blog on March 4, 2009.

At first glance, the title of this article might seem ludicrous. What growing business doesn’t need more leads? The key to the title question is the word “generate”.

In my experience, both business owners and marketers tend to focus marketing efforts almost exclusively on lead – or traffic – generation. No doubt this is an important part of the process. You’ve got to have a good level of website traffic or inbound inquiries to fill the marketing funnel.

But the generation part is just the beginning. Next, you have to convert the barely-interested, just-looking visitors into people who want to do business with your company. And this is where a lot of marketing programs can use some improvement.

For every two companies I talk with that really need to generate more traffic before doing anything else, a third company can get more results-per-dollar by focusing on conversion.

Confused?

Since most if not all new business prospects will wind up on your website at one point or another, let’s take a closer look at what happens when your lead generation efforts drive traffic to your website.

A large portion of your traffic will arrive as new or first-time visitors. This is good. It means your search marketing, SEO and/or online advertising efforts are working. People are finding you.

But mere visitors are not good enough.

Your marketing efforts must convert website visitors into interested, engaged prospects and eventually into sales-ready leads or customers. This is usually a multi-step process, and it pays to ask yourself whether or not your marketing efforts are doing a good enough job at converting these visitors.

The first challenge you face after driving traffic to your website is actually getting visitors to stay there. A disturbing number of websites today do a lousy job of this. You can see how well your website performs this responsibility by checking your bounce rate. People who bounce immediately from your site are sending you a message.  They are not going to become customers – you’ve lost them.

Once you get visitors to stick to your site your next challenge is to get them to do something. The actions they take differ from company to company depending on the buyers’ decision-making process.

Your desired conversion steps may look like this:

Download a whitepaper → take a product preview tour → attend a webinar → contact a sales person.

Or maybe more like this:

View an online demo → sign up for a free trial → become a paying customer.

Or

Visit key website pages → subscribe to a newsletter → sign up for a free consultation.

You may have multiple conversion paths and your paths may consist of some or all of these action steps or others I haven’t mentioned. The point is, you must get your visitors from point A (semi-interested visitor) to point whatever (customer or qualified lead) or your lead generation efforts are pretty useless.

Fortunately, improving conversion effectiveness is doable for any company that takes the time to following a few basic steps.

1. Identify your most important conversion (take action) points.
2. Measure the percentage of visitors who take the desired actions.
3. Brainstorm ideas for how you can get more people to take action. This can be affected by anything from your offer to the images and the persuasiveness of the copywriting to the color of your Contact Us button – and everything in between.
4. Try some of your ideas. Test, test and test some more. Google Website Optimizer is a free application that puts some sophisticated testing techniques well within the reach of small to mid-sized marketers. (More on this in another article).

The point is, you can generate new leads and traffic over and over and over again; but if you don’t turn those visitors into people who want to do business with your company then you’re just wasting money.  The best marketing program is a well-balanced one: lead or traffic generation followed by capturing interest and getting them to take action.

To ignore your conversion effectiveness renders lead generation activities about as useful as pouring good wine into a glass with a hole in the bottom.  What a waste.