If you’re like many marketers and business owners I speak with, you may be stalled in your marketing efforts because you’re not sure where to focus next. If so, this article is for you. Even if you’re not exactly standing still, distractions can consume valuable resources and kill your marketing efforts. Here’s how to avoid that.
Infinite options; finite resources
There is no lack of places to spend your marketing time and money. The key is to separate the productive options from the mere distractions, and then tackle the most productive options in order.
It helps to keep in mind the two most important results of your marketing efforts:
1. Drive more traffic (prospects) to your website, and
2. Turn more of that traffic into paying customers.
If you’re facing a marketing opportunity that doesn’t do one of these two things, you don’t need to give it anymore thought. Just cross it off your list.
But that still leaves a number of places to focus. How do you choose among them?
Website first
As I write this article, the website is still the heart of any good marketing effort. Most – if not all – of your leads and prospects will land on your website while they’re making a buying decision. It’s where they first get to know you. Multiple 3rd party studies have proven this to be true.
If you haven’t given much thought to your website lately, now is a good time to do it. Take a look at your bounce rate. If your website is driving most of your visitors away, fix that first.
Traffic second
Once you know your website is doing a decent job of holding your visitors, you can comfortably drive more traffic there. Work on this until you have a sufficient level of traffic to begin supporting your sales goals.
How much traffic is enough? That answer depends on how many new customers (for an ecommerce site) or new customer opportunities (for a lead generation site) you need to produce. I recently wrote a how-to article about this for the Cranking Widgets blog. You can read it for help on figuring out your traffic requirements: How to Be Certain You’re Spending Marketing Money Wisely.
Conversions third
Websites and traffic generation are the blocking and tackling of a good marketing program. Conversion optimization – moving more visitors and prospects to take the action(s) you want them to take – is where smart marketers begin to run up the score.
Once you’ve got your website and traffic generation humming along, you can focus ere. Get better at converting visitors to prospects and prospects to customers and you’ll quickly see the effect on your bottom line: more customers and lower acquisition costs.
The message: Avoid distractions
Distractions can kill your marketing budget. Few things really make a difference in getting paid. Focus on those. 1) Drive more traffic to your website and 2) Do more with the traffic you get.
It’s been a while since I’ve written about squeezing the most from your incredibly important website. More on that in the next article.
Meanwhile, how do you avoid marketing distractions?
Thu, Mar 10, 2011
Conversion Optimization, Strategy, Traffic
Written by: Susan Tatum