What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you kickstart your online business?
There’s a good chance that a significant part of your marketing efforts is aimed at driving traffic to your site and that’s great. But it’s important to note that the success of your business goes beyond boosting your site’s traffic; for as much as we know, the ultimate goal is to convert that traffic into sales.
So the big question is, are you getting optimal results from your marketing campaigns? After putting in so much time and effort into drawing the traffic to your site, it can be really frustrating to see little to no good results.
This is precisely why you need to look beyond boosting your site’s traffic — you need to work on your strategy and of course, set things right.
What You Need To Know:
• Right off the bat, you need to understand that the kind of traffic you draw to your site can make or break your online business. For the most part, it’s crucial for the traffic to be as highly targeted as can be. In essence, your visitors or prospective clients should have interest in your brand’s offerings and of course, be willing to take the plunge when the time is right. That said, you may want to work on your marketing plan if you find that your visitors are not relevant to your cause.
• It’s also incredibly important to learn more about your audience and of course, figure out if your products and services truly appeal to them. This is crucial.
• Finally, you need to look into how well your website is turning qualified visitors into sales or leads. In essence, your site needs to have what it takes to convert visitors in the quickest possible time. Now that there’s a good chance that you’re attracting quality visitors to your site and they’re probably interested in your products and services; you have to work on both your website and landing page.
Here’s the thing;
You have a higher chance of getting the best results from your marketing efforts if you take your time to optimize your dedicated landing page. But you won’t be wrong to focus on the overall User Experience — just be sure that the process is as smooth and easy as can be.
User Experience — The Three Step Process For Your Success
1. Learn More About Your User Goals
First off, it’s your responsibility to ensure that users can find what they want on your website and of course, easily make a purchase when the time is right. The thing is, prospective clients are unlikely to take the next step if the buying process is difficult — everyone wants it easy and this is especially true for quality visitors. The bottom line; do your best to understand your user goals and of course, make it easy for them to achieve them.
2. Review Your Business Goals
At this point, there’s a good chance that you’ve identified your user goals and probably invested in making sure they achieve every one of them. Now, that’s great, but the task doesn’t end there — you still need to prioritize your own business goals.
Speaking of goals, it could be that you’re looking to gain new leads, increase conversion, boost your social presence or to increase your mailing list. The most important thing here is to work towards achieving your main goal while maintaining the best user experience. The bottom line; achieve your business goals without ruining the user experience.
3. Work On Usability Issues
Let’s face it; even what you’d consider the most user-friendly of websites need to undergo regular checkups. Why? Well, because your user needs evolve, times are changing and of course, it’s in your best interest to keep up. Essentially, you’ll want to identify issues with usability and work on resolving them, but also ensure you continue testing and optimizing your website for optimal conversions. It’s all about playing your part to ensure everything goes smoothly for the end user — and for your business!
What’s more, you can do your research on some of the best tools and methods you can use to learn more about user behavior. If you get things right, you’ll be able to understand how they interact with your site and also get a clearer picture of their individual goals.
Wrapping It Up
With all that has been said, you can agree with me that running a successful online business goes beyond increasing your site traffic. It’s more about having the right elements in place as well as the ability to meet the needs and expectations of your visitors. In a nutshell, don’t just drive traffic to your site, instead, drive “highly targeted traffic” and of course, have everything in place to convert them in the quickest possible time. Good luck!
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3 Responses
The hardest thing for me is finding out my business goals. Specifically, what my target audience would actually buy. I guess because I’m so beyond frugal, I rarely buy stuff online, and I have a difficult time thinking in other people’s shoes. What is your advice on how to create, or sell something or obtain more subscribers to my newsletter? This is a great post, I think I just need more direction as to how to monetize my work. Any help would be awesome. My site is familytalksweekly.com
Hi Julie, thank you for your comment, and congrats on the first step towards a successful website / blog: understanding your user needs. The tricky part is aligning the needs of your users to your business goals. However, you already have your website business goal defined: to sell something. Now what you’re actually stuck with is with your actual product (what you’ll be selling). That would involve a bit more of market research – understanding what your audience needs, their pain points, and how you can fulfill these while standing out from your competition. When you have your “product” defined, then yes, you can proceed to the next steps: thinking about how to attract these people to your funnel, including getting email subscribers, optimizing your pages and website, etc. At the moment, getting email subscribers is not a direct business goal if you haven’t set up a funnel yet; or it can be something you can keep to add value. It might sound overwhelming, but step by step, and you’ll get there:)
It’s also fine that you can’t think in other people’s shoes, we are not our average user, and sometimes we make wrong assumptions about our users because of that.
My quick 3 step plan for you is: 1) Define your “dream customer profile” and start talking to these people – surveys, interviews, anything you can. At this point, it’s okay to make some assumptions, just remember you need to test them. 2) Who is visiting your website at the moment? Try to understand your current audience, whether they match your dream customer profile. If they don’t, you need to rethink your strategy, either go back to #1, or try to work on better targeted traffic. Tools like analytics, etc, can help you. There’s another blog post I have here that might help you. 3) At this point, you need to ensure your website and page you’re driving all these quality visitors to, is highly optimized and again, lots and lots of testing.
Good luck:)
Wonderful tips. I do have to remind myself it’s not just about the numbers but the ppl behind the numbers. I find it hard to figure out what exactly I’d like to do business wise with my blog. It started as simply my voice. Now I am making profit and just want to build it so I can stay home and feel like I am pitching in with the family.