Target: It all starts with the audience
Defining your target audience is an incredibly important aspect and represents the initial building blocks when it comes to creating an online marketing campaign. Knowing who to target will be the basis on which your campaign is built. The first place to start is by asking yourself questions such as ‘who will be buying my product/service?’
The answers to these types of questions will help you build a picture of who you want to attract to your site and ultimately who you want to convert. You may have the best product or offering in the marketplace, but if you are unable to target this message at the right people, your campaign will fail before it’s begun. An understanding of your target audience is imperative to the success of the SEO element of a campaign.
Engage: Getting traffic is only the start
Engaging your audience is all about making sure that visitors to your site find the right content to feed their desire. Whether that desire is to find the best deals or relevant contact details, it is imperative that the right information is positioned at strategic locations throughout your site. A well thought out site structure and user experience will increase return rates and the probability of visitors spreading the word on your product/service.
Convert: Getting your visitors to convert
Converting your visitors is the final step in the ‘Conversion Marketing’ process. Once you have defined your target audience, generated traffic to your site and created engaging content, you need to focus on converting that traffic. This is all about maximising the value of your audience, enabling them to complete the tasks they desire in the most efficient manner.
Once understood how these three aspects have the impact to generate higher sales conversion, it must be considered how they can be integrated into a campaign’s processes. Below are some recommendations around how this can be achieved:
How to: ensure you’re targeting the right audience
Data planning
Good data planning will provide a campaign with answers to those key questions ‘who should I target?’ and what visitors ‘will drive conversions?’. A data planning methodology can reveal important insights, such as YouTube reaches 50 per cent of car buyers online. This kind of competitive intelligence can prove invaluable for an online marketing campaign, but can also be used to develop user personas to further segment target audiences.
Keyword research
Keyword research is an important facet of SEO and draws a distinct parallel to traditional market research. Just as successful ad campaigns contain content that appeals to their target demographic, successful websites need to focus on keywords that have the highest relevance and conversion rates. This will also provide insight into a wider target audience and discover additional popular search terms relevant to a brand/website, therefore targeting valuable search traffic for a campaign.
Knowing how to engage your visitors requires you to completely understand your users. What drives them, what excites them and what keeps them entertained. Following the ‘target’ phase you will know exactly who your users are and what they want.
How to: engage with site visitors and keep them on your site
Well-planned site
Delivering the right content to the right users is essential in making sure your visitors are engaged. A site needs a well thought out information architecture, providing content in an accessible and easy to use format. Items such as a sitemaps, navigation aids, search functions and page schematics are all important aspects of information architecture and form part of an exemplary user experience.
Entry points
Thinking about where you want users to enter the site is an important part of engagement. Delivering the right pages to the right audience at the right time will maximize the chance of multiple page views and retention. The purpose of a landing page is to attract a user at a particular stage of the purchasing cycle, enabling them to complete their desired action immediately, such as purchasing a product, filling in a form or contacting you. Landing pages must be relevant to users, so it’s key to remember to target well.
How to: turn your visitors into sales
Make it easy
Every website should have a purpose, whether this is to sell products, provide information or improve a brand image. When building your site these objectives should be prominent in your design process. Designing for conversion is all about making it easy for visitors to perform actions you define and results in:
Increased conversion – Sales, registrations or leads
Better usability – Clear signposting and intuitive journeys through content
Accessibility – Copy, images, colours, navigation and calls to action
Stronger brand experience – Users’ needs are met in a way they’d want and expect
Remember best practice
Using best practice is key to effective design for conversion. Whilst the whole process is complex, the underlying aspects are straightforward:
Be mindful of trends – Reinventing the wheel can cost more and confuse users
Exploit Smart Technology – Loading times, accessibility and SEO benefits behind the scenes
Use simple visual language – Colours, sizes and styles all carry weights of meaning
Familiarity is key – No need to relearn ‘how to’
