Whether you’ve come up with a fantastic new business idea or you’ve got over the post-Christmas lull and are ready for action with your existing businesses. March is a key time of the year to make you focus on making the changes necessary to ensure a successful year ahead.
So where will your focus your efforts to attract new business?
These days everyone thinks they are a social media expert, so you would be forgiven for thinking that Facebook or Instagram (or one of the others) are going to be the answer to all of your ‘obtaining new clients’ desires. However, even with regular posting, thousands of people following you and high engagement levels with your posts (lots of likes and or comments) statistically only 0.7% of these are likely to convert into a sale for you. Disappointing huh.
What about email marketing? Another solid choice, however 1.) you need to have a database of email addresses to start (these can be purchased legitimately, however, this can be costly, and also you are effectively cold calling these people – so unlikely to be ‘hot leads’) 2.) With emails, it’s not just a case of a bit of text and an image, they need to be well designed to ensure engagement. If you have a good organic database AND have some design flare, or use one of MailChimp’s handy dandy templates (n.b. other email marketing software is available) – you still might be disappointed to hear that you would be expecting an average of 3% conversion rate from email marketing campaigns.
Ok so wheres the good news?
So you’re disappointed with the conversion rate statistics for social media posts and email marketing? How about if we told you that SEO optimised webpages can expect a conversion rate of 15%? Ok, we understand, not quite the 100% you were looking for? But when you consider this is 400% more than you can expect from email marketing (or more than 1400% more than social media posts) – it might be a better place to focus your marketing budget! There is a very good, and logical reasoning behind this. You see, an SEO optimised website appears in front of prospective clients because they have typed in the keywords that your website has been optimised for. For example, if you are a plumber in Kenilworth, and you have a landing page for targeted for the key phrase “bathroom fitters Kenilworth” – when a prospective client enters that search term into a search engine, and your website appears – you know they are a ‘hot lead’. The reason they found your website is because their search term and your website keyword optimisation match – therefore you are very likely to be answering their question. The next step is does your website answer their question quickly enough? or provide them with a simple way to get in touch with you (either a simple contact form or phone number)? If the answer to that is yes, then you are looking at a high possibility to at least getting an enquiry from that customer.
Aside from the obvious higher conversion rate, it is important to consider the value for money. In creating an optimised website/ landing page this exists on the internet for an indefinite amount of time, in fact, it is something that improves with age. Social media and email marketing are the complete opposite – you need to keep posting / sending in the hope of being noticed – whereas if your landing page has been optimised correctly, the ‘hot leads’ will keep coming without the need for you to do anything at all – other than to respond to their enquiries.