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- Herausgeber: Editorial Martin
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Serie: Digital Marketing Journey
- Sprache: Englisch
Website conversions are elusive. Hard to obtain and harder to sustain. From Ecommerce to bookings or lead generation sites, we are in the game to optimise our websites in order to maximise the ad spend. What do we do when results aren't there, when agencies don't know what's failing and businesess need to revise their site from a different optic? This book will give you an all-around idea of what's needed to find it out. What's at play and what are the things that you and your team haven't considered but are extremely relevant in order to bring conversions back.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Jim Martin
Convert
Make your website sell more
Founder´s edition
A Digital Marketing Journey Series
Martin, Juan Ignacio
Convert : Make your website sell more / Juan Ignacio Martin. - 1a ed. - Mar del Plata : Martín, 2022.
Libro digital, EPUB
Archivo Digital: descarga
ISBN 978-987-543-237-6
1. Marketing Directo. 2. Comunicación Digital. I. Título.
CDD 658.804
All rights reserved; reproduction in part or in a whole without permission is prohibited.
© Editorial Martin
www.editorialmartin.com
ISBN 978-987-543-237-6
Primera edición en formato digital: junio de 2022
Versión: 1.0
Digitalización: Proyecto 451
Prologue
It was 7.30 pm on a Tuesday when one of the only three employees that were still working that day for a Marketing Agency started to scream: “this cannot be happening!!”. Immediately, the other two colleagues jumped off their seats and went to see him: “what happened?”.
With a trembling finger, the consternated marketing analyst pointed to the screen: “I found this”.
It probably took 5 seconds for the other two to realise what just happened: they were seeing something of a nightmare for any business and marketing agency: the analyst found out that for the past 25 months a Google Ads campaign was running, spending USD10k per month… driving all traffic to a page that didn’t exist.
In essence, that campaign went under everyone’s radar and misspent over USD250k in two years.
While quite fatal of an error it seems the big company who paid for the ads didn’t even realise of that leak. That’s a luxury small and medium-size companies cannot afford.
You’d notice that leak and also, minor ones too. Every single dollar or lead matter to us.
In fact, not only you’d notice a minor misspent but also be asking yourself:
How can I get more leads/sales?
How can I better manage the work agencies do for me?
Why do certain campaigns work, and why some of them don’t?
How can I scale my business?
Managing a business is hard enough to, on top of that, have to go through the vast noise of marketing to choose reliable partners that can help you move your business forward.
The good news is that you are not alone. Not by far. There is a group of people out there struggling with the same challenges. People who are tired of trying with different marketing agencies, who have tried different web designs without seeing much change and that after years of running the business, digital marketing is still a rocky & obscure activity.
Perhaps this time we can do things differently. Perhaps this book can be the beginning of a new way to see digital marketing & websites like you haven’t seen before and, in the process, to find people who share the same pains as you do and who have already found a solution.
Let me tell you: this is not intended to be ‘the 5 step framework to unlock 8 figures’ kind of book. Rather, we are proposing a journey. Cutting through the noise with a sharp marketing knife and giving you the tools you need to see your business, your marketing activities and your current partnerships with a new set of fresh eyes.
Let’s move away from simple tactics that won’t move our business forward and instead focus on what’s really happening behind the scenes of your business, what do you need to do next in order to unlock sustainable, progressive and genuine growth.
Every single page that comes ahead has been the result of many years of work, study, thinking and thinking again. I hope you enjoy it and more than that, I hope it means a difference to you.
Foundations:
understanding the context
In the rush of driving sales we forget immediately that we are dealing with humans. Very quickly we turn to demographics: ‘we’ll market to people in their 40s, that’s our target,’ in a brief attempt to simplify the universe of potential customers and take action. But in doing so, we end up neglecting the experience for those who matter.
As a professional dedicated to the study of web sales (also called conversions), I’ve been tasked to fix hundreds of websites. And when I’m saying ‘fixing’, I’m in reality trying to solve these questions: “Why aren’t we selling more?”, “Why aren’t users clicking here, filling this form more?”.
And so we start digging, like a true web detective. With the tool set resembling a doctor’s one we ask the client to tell us their symptoms: ‘Do you have enough traffic? Were you selling more before and now experiencing a drop?’. And based on that diagnosis we get some initial conclusions like ‘you need to see a specialist… a Google Ads expert, a Web designer, Copywriter, SEO professional...etc’.
Rinse and repeat. In most cases, we hit the root of the problem and we collectively (between all the ones who participate in the client’s digital marketing effort), find a way out, a way to move forward.
But what makes the difference in the long term is not the fact we get to run a diagnosis, or that clients have a number of partners to help around. The difference is that some businesses and marketing teams want to find out more, go deeper and try to get an understanding of ‘why we get to this situation in the first place, and how to avoid it, how to make it better’.
Why is this so important? Because at the end of the day it is not the website that needs to be optimised, nor it depends on the partners you get surrounded with. No, at the end of the day the most important, crucial part of a digital side of a business is… you.
The way you’ll decide what to do, in which priority, whom to trust, what level of energy to invest, how consistently … that trumps any other marketing effort or tactic you can ever put to practice.
This is the true foundation: the way you see and understand web experiences will have a huge impact down the road.
Now, in order to build a solid foundation, we need to be honest with ourselves: you’ve been exposed to a number of marketing strategies, courses, articles, designs and as such, you might have a solidified idea of what works and what doesn’t work.
I need to ask you to have an open mind, to join me in this journey from the beginning, to disassemble what we give for granted and put the pieces back together. But this time, we will sift through a different meaning to them.
Let’s start by highlighting paradigms, that is the given truths you and I will start with:
Nobody will ever know your customers better than you do. Not even the marketing agencies who might be running ads for you.Your business is unique. You can have 20 competitors but your style, your culture and people will always be different.We deal with humans. Unpredictable, emotional & varied human beings who might not reveal the true nature of why they do what they do.You are not alone. Someone else is facing the same pains, challenges and perhaps even has solved & shared the way out.Bias is the enemy. A friend that tells you ‘this looks good/bad’, an article with the latest trend you might be missing… you’ll have to fight a sea of external noise that will try to tempt you to drive you off the path of reason.We’ll need to embrace Marketing in order to make it work. When Marketing becomes a ‘I have to’, same as everything else… it ends up having less energy, less attention that it should (it happened to me when I saw the first financial year accounting work to be done as an ‘I have to’! And didn’t end up well, until I reshaped my way of seeing this and embraced accounting as a vital part of my business).Patience is a virtue. In order to set in motion the changes that will produce that sustainable growth we talked about before, we will need to be patient, have perseverance & follow through. I know you can do it!There you go: these aren’t the ‘7 pillars of automatic success to unlock 8 figures’ but instead more real premises that will permeate through everything we’ll do next. Are you in? Great!
Clean slate
Remember that scene from The Matrix where Neo enters a virtual room with Morpheus that is plain white and there’s nothing on it? (they called it ‘the construct’). I want us to do the same. I’ll be your Morpheus-esque character but instead of seeing two sofas and a TV, we’ll see this:
There’s a potential customer on the left and your company is on the right. In the middle is the product or service you provide.
As simple as it could ever be: we want to produce a change of behaviour in that the person on the left willingly, for that customer/user to happily request your product and for you to deliver it to them.
Easily enough? Now what if we add many more people on the right, many more products and services of all kinds in the middle, and also many more customers on the left. Cacophony ensued!
The way businesses have evolved to fight this situation has been quite different but I can identify two big and different ways: the way of the East and the way of the West.
In the West (the so called western countries) we have this classical approach that you’d recognise instantly:
We have a brand, a channel, a message, an audience, an offer, a product/service
To mechanically make them work we utilise Paid ads & organic traffic as channels, we introduce our sneak preview of an offer there, we target audiences as much as the given platforms allows us to and we then lure clicks into our websites. Once there, we wrap up the intended offer and give users extra info in the hopes that’s enough for them to make a decision and buy from us / contact us. Nothing new here, right?
In the East (and also in Latin America), however, they do things a bit differently: while there’s a channel, and one offer… in many cases, there are no websites to finalise what the offer is about and to sway users into conversions. Instead, they skip this step and send users to speak with a representative directly via a messenger platform like WeChat/WhatsApp.
Now, this isn’t just a cultural adaptation to this process, it also highlights what humans need as basics to be able to complete a transaction: the reassurance from another human being that the things they are after are legit.
When you think about it, websites are making a good effort to mimic a human response that will grant that reassurance to users: that they are in the right place, that others are also engaging with the same offers, that this is indeed what you need today (and not tomorrow).
Very quickly we are now stepping into many implicit areas a website should fulfil. But let’s not get too deep before understanding the user’s journey and what are the biggest areas we have to master to ensure a good user experience.
The 4 main levers that affect the way users buy (or not) from you
If we could group those big areas into simple concepts we will come up with 4 big ‘levers’ who can impact businesses greatly. They also are our means to do our best to control & tame that web traffic and turn it into conversions.
What are those levers, then? We understand ‘levers’ as areas we can control that will block or unlock the passage of users from the awareness stage to becoming your regular customer.
The first lever: validation
I’ve seen many businesses succeed, many to fail and in between there’s a big array of differences between each of them. When trying to narrow down the reasons of the successes/failures from a rational and dispassionate perspective, I couldn’t understand at first the ‘whys’.
There were simply too many invisible forces at play.
Ironically, that was the beginning of the answer: if there are many invisible forces but we can see the effects, can we at least group them, and turn the invisible into something we can name?
In order to identify those ‘invisible forces’ I asked myself ‘what elements have in common between those who succeed and those who failed?
What elements were different and how did those affect the outcome?’
Simple questions, hard answers and the clock was ticking while we had businesses and families depending on this to work: we needed to understand.
Because there’s nothing more bitter than being unable to help a business thrive: we get the nasty reminder that success isn’t guaranteed at all. The best we can do is study, identify and learn from mistakes.
A couple of years ago I got this request: can you help a recently launched company to improve their website, so they can maximise returns from ad spending?
And that’s what I do. Or at least, that’s what I thought I was doing at the time. So of course, I said ‘happy to help‘.
This company has two pet vets as owners who discovered the possibility of providing a convenient flea and worm treatment for dogs and cats, via mail, to their customers. All this is under a subscription model.
They opened doors 5 months before reaching me and they’ve been spending $10k in paid ads per month. There were a couple of issues:
They were selling less than 10 products per monthThey were burning their own savings on thisAlso, they were paying to business advisors and others as well (plus now, they’d pay for my services too)Well, right here I learned the hard way that in order to improve something, it first needs to work. I did my best to help them with their site, to simplify their offer (from potential 60+ combinations of products to only 3 packages), but still, they weren’t selling much. So I did what was the right ethical call to do: resign. Their money needed to be put somewhere else that makes more sense from the business point of view.
What happened here? How does this get connected with the 4 main levers?
The realisation was: every business is at a given level of maturity.
Maturity can be defined as the degree in which the company has identified a need and has developed & delivered a product or service that has been validated by the consumers.
Validated as in: over a period of time (no less than a year) and by organic means (not solely requiring paid ads) has successfully managed to position its products/services and achieved enough profit to sustain further growth. It requires time to validate a new product, as we need to see if that service can survive through external factors like festive seasons, crazy world changes (Covid, lockdowns) etc.
Furthermore: every time a brand launches a new line of services and/or products, those will need to be included in the process of validation as well. When Cheetos launched ‘Cheetos Lip Balm” back in 2005, you could say ‘because people know this brand, their product will already experience some kind of success’, but this is not what happened here: Cheetos-flavored lip balm simply failed to catch on with consumers and was a failure.
This is the first ‘lever’ we need to recognise when we try to answer the question ‘what elements are needed to consistently sell my products/services?’’. You could blame the site, the produced ads… but at the end of the day, if consumers aren’t ready or don’t like your product/service there’s no way to go back.
So the 1st ‘lever’ is Validation.
As per the business I mentioned before, they bleed so much in paid ads with no return that they were forced to cancel all ads, all business advisory services they were getting … everything.
They reverted back to step 1: validation. They have been trying to grow the business from the initial supportive community first, organically. Haven’t seen them growing as much ever since, but that’s part of the journey. We need to put the right pieces in place of we’ll get stuck, as harsh as this might sound.
Wrapping up!
Most businesses will acknowledge immediately where they are in terms of validation: after some immediate questions such as margins, revenue growth, over which period of time, a business can give a sense of how matured/validated their products or services are.
By the time you read this book, you might fall into one of these two scenarios: either you are preparing to launch a new company or product or you have been managing an existing one for some time. In some cases, for many years.
If you are the latter, know that validation will exist as a lever in any case you launch a new area of your business.
If you are confident your products have been validated then ‘close’ this lever. Turn it off and instead work with the following three ones.
The second lever: branding
This one has to do with what was mentioned before: you as a prospect (or potential customer) are standing in front of someone that either you don’t know, partially know or are familiar with.
The more familiar you are with it, the easier the interaction will be. You’ll know if what the person has to offer is what you are looking for, and also, that invisible barrier of missing ‘trust’ won’t be there.
Easy said than done: how can your company achieve that level of familiarity with every single prospect? Especially when we aren’t using the ‘Eastern’ way of communication via Wechat, human to human response.
Steve Jobs simplified this concept very nicely, he said ‘A brand is simply trust’.
Doesn’t matter how small or big your brand is, you still need to achieve that familiarity with your intended audience if you are to get the best results. And with that, we mean: to be heard, to get prospects’ attention, to have a chance to positively influence their behaviour, and to establish a customer-company relationship.
Another great quote comes from Tom Goodwin: “Brands are essentially patterns of familiarity, meaning, fondness, and reassurance that exist in the minds of people.”
That sense of familiarity is achieved through consistency in the ways your company communicates and acts.
I used to work as a Digital Marketing Manager, years ago, for a big educational group called ACG (in New Zealand). My boss, Marketing Director Kim H. was always so dedicated to the small details that you wouldn’t believe the great lengths she would take to ensure consistency.
And that’s the word: “consistency is the key, Jim”, she would say to me.
We would need to revise private schools brochures, again and again, check the photos used: are those the same we did use in the international flyer? Landing page? Banner at the school entrance?
What about the wording? The keywords to highlight the schools’ values needed to be exactly the same, even though we were targeting 13 different countries to lure international students. ‘More so’, she’d say ‘it’s even more important to ensure each country gets our brand the way it should be’.
ACG sold at a crazy high price of 500 million dollars in 2016. One of the reasons behind the success was how predictive they were. Student agents around the world would always get the same product, in the same way, and consistently. And the quality of teaching was superior too. A compelling offer sustained over time.
I learned that a brand can unlock a lot of blocks in the process of producing ‘sales’ (or enrolments, in this case) via ads and websites if the people on the other side had a good recognition of what to expect.
I concluded that ‘branding is a necessity’, is one of the 4 levers and, depending on the company and its context, perhaps the most important one of the 4.
