As a followup to “How to Build Trust and Grow Sales in 2017,” here’s a helpful infographic that Bluewire Media created, based on consumer research, that explains various ways to help customers get to know your enterprise, trust it, and buy from it in 2017.
As you can see, this content marketing funnel infographic shows how a website visitor moves from gathering information about your offerings (products, services, experiences) to becoming your customer. Since 98% of website visitors are not ready to buy, it’s critical to have content for them to get to know you and like you.
Know: 75% of your website visitors are looking for information
In other words, 75% of customers that visit your website are not ready to buy and only looking for information. The question is: what can you give your website visitors that is no risk or a low risk for them? What kind of no risk offers ( no registration required to get blog articles, Youtube videos, interviews, audio files) or low risk offers ( email registration or social media registration to get e-books, templates, reports, guides etc.) can you create easily and well? Now, you may think creating such content will take too much time or be too costly, but consider this: If your business spends $300 on a print or radio ad just to make someone aware of your business, isn’t it worth $300 of your time (or some other professional’s) to create content for a potential customer who has already made it to your website? Who do you think is more likely to sign up for your email newsletter or buy? The person listening to the radio on their way to work or someone who is actively searching for something and comes to your website? Regularly putting informative and useful no risk and low risk offers on your website is critical if you don’t want to lose out on the 75% of visitors that come to your website. Plus, regularly posting content on your website is a necessity for people to find your business when they search in Google (A.K.A Search Engine Optimization).
Like: 23% of website visitors are comparing
In my last blog post about building trust and growing sales, I wrote about the importance of social proof. For my clients, demonstrating social proof means uploading customer testimonials with their photos, sharing photos on social media of where the food comes from, doing demos or presentations, sending email newsletters, collecting endorsements (for example reviews on Google, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Yelp, or from food critics, etc.). This kind of social proof is very important to have on your website for website visitors that are comparing your businesses with others. This will give you a “leg up” because many business underestimate the value of social proof and skip it altogether. An easy way to add social proof to your website is to copy an endorsement from Tripadvisor, Facebook etc or a quote from a media review. It’s even better if the social proof comes with a photo or video of the endorser. Without social proof, website visitors who could be customers, have no reason to like your business and or trust it. As hundreds of studies and experts have reported, customers have to trust a business before they buy from it.
Trust: Only 2% of website visitors trust your business and are ready to buy
It needs to be easy for customers to contact you to buy from you, but this is often not the part of the funnel where businesses are leaving money on the table. However, I will make a few quick comments on this for different business types:
- If you’re a brick and mortar business, your phone number needs to be on every page of your website and it needs to be clickable from a mobile phone. Ever try to copy text from a website page on a mobile device? It’s a nightmare. When I was doing wine tourism marketing, research showed that over 50% of website visitors were just looking for the address of the business. Long story short, make it easy to find your address on the website or you will lose business
- If you’re an online product based business, it needs to be easy to buy from you. There must be a link to products from every piece of your “Know” and “Like” content, as you can’t expect customers to take in your content and then go searching for a product on your website. This seems obvious, but you’d surprised how many businesses don’t link directly to their product pages from their content. There are so many tricks and tips for optimizing online based product and service based businesses, see the blog conversion link below for a video series on this topic.
- If you’re a service based business, the service page should include how your service addresses the“pain” or “gain” that you are addressing for your customers (for example, “how this lead generation program helps build an effective automated system for sales and lead generation”- from Scott Oldford’s Lead Craft), then content explaining how it works (video, text whatever works best for you), list of benefits with icons, social proof (testimonials, client logos, media logos), additional benefits included (for example, also included “free growth hacking guide for increasing Instagram followers.”) Pro-tip: have a guarantee of some kind for your customers to show confidence in your service. For example, “30 day money back guarantee.”
If website conversion is what your business needs, I recommend checking out Derek Halpern’s series of website reviews on “increasing blog conversion” https://socialtriggers.com/increase-blog-conversions-video Choose one that applies to your business type.
More on Building Trust and Growing Sales in 2017 here
If you found this useful and don’t want to miss my next post, sign-up for my exclusive monthly-ish email newsletter here
Recent Comments