People who come in contact with a web agency as we always do because they have a problem with their web marketing efforts. The problem is that in most cases, the main reason why marketers need help with their digital marketing does not reveal that the tip of the iceberg. Often the initiatives undertaken by the organizations are not part of an integrated strategy and, taken individually, do not generate the expected results.
In this article, I will help you identify the reasons why you do not get results with your web approaches by presenting common mistakes made in the various stages of a digital strategy.
1- You have planned an integrated digital strategy
Before taking specific actions on the web, it is important to conduct planning your web strategy. The stage of completion of a digital planning should provide a guideline for all activities that you will make online. This planning will allow you to prioritize initiatives based on your goals and needs of your customers.
In this article, I will help you identify the reasons why you do not get results with your web approaches by presenting common mistakes made in the various stages of a digital strategy.
1- You have planned an integrated digital strategy
Before taking specific actions on the web, it is important to conduct planning your web strategy. The stage of completion of a digital planning should provide a guideline for all activities that you will make online. This planning will allow you to prioritize initiatives based on your goals and needs of your customers.
One of the most important elements that come out of a strategic planning is the Personas by defining your organization. In fact, knowing to whom you should direct your efforts on the web, you'll be much more easily able to determine if an initiative is a priority or secondary.
The key is not to lose sight of your Personas!
While it is increasingly common for organizations developing personas to define their target audience, it often happens that they are helpless when it comes time to undertake new initiatives. If your boss sees that a competitor has more than 5,000 "Likes" on his business Facebook page that asks you to get the same results, try not acquiescing automatically. Prove to him rather why obtaining more "Likes" does not represent the activity that will allow you to better understand the needs of your target customer and should not be a priority for your organization.
2- Your sources of traffic are not varied enough
When defining the means by which you will drive traffic to your site, you need to multiply the opportunities to come into contact with users, either with paid media, held or acquired. The people who make up your target audience are at different stages of their decision-making and with a strategy of acquiring traffic, you need to determine what means will be used to reach your persona at each stage of its decision process.
For example, in terms of ‘’return on investment’’, it is not worth paying for visitors who come to your site to educate. While you should work in Inbound Marketing and use SEO, content creation and social media to acquire less educated visitors about your offer, you will be more interested in paying for visitors who are closer to a conversion.
A very common problem with the acquisition and traffic sources is that marketing managers often rely heavily on advertising to generate visits to a static website. With Google AdWords, advertisers pay to have their ads appear on specific queries. But with too generic queries, you can get a lot of visitors looking to learn about a subject. Save precious advertising dollars and make sure to limit your advertising to users who are willing to do business with you!
Once you have managed to build a significant audience seeking to educate with your initiatives Inbound Marketing, you can then bring them back to your website and develop them in their decision-making process through marketing campaigns by email or with publications on social media. This will allow you to diversify your traffic sources and thus build on an acquisition strategy of winning traffic.
3- You do not have enough conversion points on your website
Ideally, every visitor lands on your site should identify a solution that meets their needs at the moment when he visits your site. By working from the perspective of Inbound Marketing, a large proportion of your visitors seek to educate, justifying the creation of an educational nature offers such grids and downloadable guides or white papers.
Too often the only point of conversion that is identifiable on a website is an invitation to get in touch with the organization through the contact page. If you want to use your website as a marketing tool to generate leads, you must multiply the conversion points and offer your visitors opportunities to convert at different levels of their decision process.
4- Your conversion elements are not performing
Maybe have you realized that you had to create a set of offers to generate leads, but your conversion elements do not generate the expected results. Here is a set of points which would then be considered:
Does each of your tender is put forward on pages where they are relevant?
Does each of your offers have a landing page on which it is well explained and detailed?
Do you have done an audit of your website that allows you to identify gaps in ergonomics and usability of your pages with low conversion rate?
In presenting these points in question, you should be able to improve the performance of your conversion elements!
5- You do not have a retention strategy in place
Retention is today one of the key success factors of a company. To increase retention, recurrence, the average value of a customer or the sale of products and services crossed, it is very important to invest effort after the initial transaction.
It is very important to include tactics to work on these elements. For example, there are many email automation is possible after the completion of different conversions on the website. In addition, one of the easiest to implement elements which can improve the satisfaction of a customer is conducting satisfaction surveys, whether the questionnaires or to live time feedback tools like Tally Hubspot.
By implementing this type of tactic, you will interact with your customers that will allow you both to offer them related offers and get their comments and feedback on your website.
6- You do not follow the good performance indicators
When it comes time to measure your performance on the web, you must make sure to associate the right performance indicators to the different goals that you want to measure.
First, in order to compare your performance to your goals effectively, you must ensure that your goals are SMART, that is to say specified, measurable, achievable, realistic and time. Then, when your goals are well defined, you must make sure to define separate performance indicators for each major problem of web strategy, or traffic acquisition, engagement of visitors and conversion.
By defining specific indicators each of these issues, you will be certain to arrive at the right conclusions by analyzing your data. A major problem with the measure of performance that is very common is to assign a measure to poor by problematic. For example, if you have 20 conversions on a page that got 5000 visits, the problem lies in the conversion, as they would be at the level of acquisition if we were talking about 20 conversions on 40 visits. Sometimes with general observations like "this campaign has not worked," we neglect important details! Perhaps we should say rather "The acquisition strategy behind this campaign did not work", which would give a much better idea of actions to correct the situation.
The key is not to lose sight of your Personas!
While it is increasingly common for organizations developing personas to define their target audience, it often happens that they are helpless when it comes time to undertake new initiatives. If your boss sees that a competitor has more than 5,000 "Likes" on his business Facebook page that asks you to get the same results, try not acquiescing automatically. Prove to him rather why obtaining more "Likes" does not represent the activity that will allow you to better understand the needs of your target customer and should not be a priority for your organization.
2- Your sources of traffic are not varied enough
When defining the means by which you will drive traffic to your site, you need to multiply the opportunities to come into contact with users, either with paid media, held or acquired. The people who make up your target audience are at different stages of their decision-making and with a strategy of acquiring traffic, you need to determine what means will be used to reach your persona at each stage of its decision process.
For example, in terms of ‘’return on investment’’, it is not worth paying for visitors who come to your site to educate. While you should work in Inbound Marketing and use SEO, content creation and social media to acquire less educated visitors about your offer, you will be more interested in paying for visitors who are closer to a conversion.
A very common problem with the acquisition and traffic sources is that marketing managers often rely heavily on advertising to generate visits to a static website. With Google AdWords, advertisers pay to have their ads appear on specific queries. But with too generic queries, you can get a lot of visitors looking to learn about a subject. Save precious advertising dollars and make sure to limit your advertising to users who are willing to do business with you!
Once you have managed to build a significant audience seeking to educate with your initiatives Inbound Marketing, you can then bring them back to your website and develop them in their decision-making process through marketing campaigns by email or with publications on social media. This will allow you to diversify your traffic sources and thus build on an acquisition strategy of winning traffic.
3- You do not have enough conversion points on your website
Ideally, every visitor lands on your site should identify a solution that meets their needs at the moment when he visits your site. By working from the perspective of Inbound Marketing, a large proportion of your visitors seek to educate, justifying the creation of an educational nature offers such grids and downloadable guides or white papers.
Too often the only point of conversion that is identifiable on a website is an invitation to get in touch with the organization through the contact page. If you want to use your website as a marketing tool to generate leads, you must multiply the conversion points and offer your visitors opportunities to convert at different levels of their decision process.
4- Your conversion elements are not performing
Maybe have you realized that you had to create a set of offers to generate leads, but your conversion elements do not generate the expected results. Here is a set of points which would then be considered:
Does each of your tender is put forward on pages where they are relevant?
Does each of your offers have a landing page on which it is well explained and detailed?
Do you have done an audit of your website that allows you to identify gaps in ergonomics and usability of your pages with low conversion rate?
In presenting these points in question, you should be able to improve the performance of your conversion elements!
5- You do not have a retention strategy in place
Retention is today one of the key success factors of a company. To increase retention, recurrence, the average value of a customer or the sale of products and services crossed, it is very important to invest effort after the initial transaction.
It is very important to include tactics to work on these elements. For example, there are many email automation is possible after the completion of different conversions on the website. In addition, one of the easiest to implement elements which can improve the satisfaction of a customer is conducting satisfaction surveys, whether the questionnaires or to live time feedback tools like Tally Hubspot.
By implementing this type of tactic, you will interact with your customers that will allow you both to offer them related offers and get their comments and feedback on your website.
6- You do not follow the good performance indicators
When it comes time to measure your performance on the web, you must make sure to associate the right performance indicators to the different goals that you want to measure.
First, in order to compare your performance to your goals effectively, you must ensure that your goals are SMART, that is to say specified, measurable, achievable, realistic and time. Then, when your goals are well defined, you must make sure to define separate performance indicators for each major problem of web strategy, or traffic acquisition, engagement of visitors and conversion.
By defining specific indicators each of these issues, you will be certain to arrive at the right conclusions by analyzing your data. A major problem with the measure of performance that is very common is to assign a measure to poor by problematic. For example, if you have 20 conversions on a page that got 5000 visits, the problem lies in the conversion, as they would be at the level of acquisition if we were talking about 20 conversions on 40 visits. Sometimes with general observations like "this campaign has not worked," we neglect important details! Perhaps we should say rather "The acquisition strategy behind this campaign did not work", which would give a much better idea of actions to correct the situation.