The Expert Podcast

So how is your marketing doing for your company? Are you getting any results? Part of it could be what is the approach or the intention or the goals of your marketing person, department, or even outsourced. Many times, a marketing person or company is looking to get clicks. They're looking to generate traffic on your website, which is a good starting point. However, if those clicks and visitors are not turning into sales, then that's a problem. What are the three reasons why marketing for clicks is going to fail for your company?

Reason number one is they're not looking at the right volume. If you're trying to get a few hundred or 20 or 30 or a few dozen clicks on your website every day, that's going to be a fail. Most website traffic converts at about 1% or less, so if you get 100 visitors, that's one sale. Some types of products or services have a conversion rate of half a percent, and we'll talk about how that makes a difference in the future. So you need thousands and thousands of visitors every day in order to move the needle on your sales.

If your marketing department is looking to get clicks but thinks that 100 people or 200 people is really good, then that's going to put you in a bad spot because you're going to be looking at what you think is a lot of traffic, and maybe your marketing person thinks it's a lot of traffic, but you don't have any money to show for it. Here's the big punchline: You can't deposit clicks in your bank account. Your bank will not let you make a deposit of clicks or visitors. Clicks are not money. Visitors are not money. Likes are not money on social media. The only thing that's money is when you sell something. So don't think that clicks, likes, follows, or forwards make any difference until you actually have a sale. You don't have anything. So make sure you're looking at large volumes of clicks.

Second, what is the origin of those clicks? Is it just people that are tire kickers? Are they people that are not really interested in your product? A lot of times, you can actually generate traffic to a website for entertainment only—people that are just kind of browsing around. They want to see a pretty picture, maybe you have a video that's interesting to watch, but you're not getting qualified leads to your website or qualified customers to your website. Even if you have a larger volume, even if you get a thousand people, if those thousand people are just looking for some free information, that's not qualified.

Another type of qualified is, are they financially worthy? Meaning, can they afford your product? Do they want to buy your product? If you're getting the wrong kind of customers on your website, they can't afford to buy it. Maybe it's out of their league. Maybe they're looking at some other offering that's less money, maybe not a competitor, but maybe some other service, which would serve their purpose just as good for less money. So you want to make sure that you're getting the right kind of visitors, in addition to getting a large number of visitors on your website. Remember the key word: You can't deposit clicks in the bank.

So what if you're getting a lot of clicks, visitors? What if they are qualified, but you're still not getting sales? Number three is what's called user experience or UX. You want to make sure that your website performs, not in terms of how slick it looks or how good it looks. Is it an art project? Will it win awards for how pretty it is? You want to go by what makes people actually take action. There may be something on your website that makes it difficult for somebody to take action. Maybe you have to click too many times to get through to the order page. Maybe it's confusing where the buttons are. You know, one of the biggest patents issued in the last 20 years was a patent issued to Amazon for one-click buying. So you click, and it orders right then and there.

You want to make your website as easy to get through as possible. You don't want to put a lot of barriers. You don't want to put a lot of words mixed in. You want to make the order button very big, and you want to make it match the expectations of your visitor. Even if it's easy to buy, if your visitor is expecting something else on your website, then you're not going to get that order conversion rate. You might get a bounce rate that's too high. That's something else to look at. Make sure that your marketing person is reporting to you all this traffic you're getting. How many are you bouncing off the website very quickly and not staying as a sticky website, a sticky customer on your web asset to read through the pages, gather information? Look, if they don't buy, that's fine. Make sure you have an alternate call to action.

Your best call to action on your website: buy something, click here, give me your credit card, buy my product. You want to have a backup call to action: Do you want more information? Give us your email. Click to call. Maybe book an appointment, maybe book a consultation. You want to have a backup call to action. Not everybody's going to buy. Remember, on a good day, you might get a 1% conversion rate or closing rate, so that's 99 out of 100 people who don't buy something. Maybe you can get 10 or 15 of them to at least do something: give an email, get a text, download a white paper, anything—click on a video. But make sure you don't do that at the expense of sales. Make sure you do it as a backup, and there's ways to do that.

So the three rules for marketing are: Make sure you're getting volume traffic, make sure you're getting qualified traffic, and make sure you're making the traffic easy to do something (buy, backup conversion rate, alternate call to action). Those are the three keys. If your marketing person can't describe to you how they're trying to achieve each one of those and what their success is, you want to make some adjustments to what their process is. If they can't tell you what's happening with traffic, is it going up? What they're trying to do to get more traffic? If it's just posting on Facebook and hoping for the best, that's not a marketing plan. If it's buying Google traffic and hoping for the best, that's not a marketing plan. A marketing plan is very specific: get more visitors, track the conversion rate, make sure they're qualified, and adjust constantly to have better results for your business. Because until you get a sale, money in the cash register (virtually speaking), you have nothing, and all your efforts are in vain.

Of course, you have to do closing and conversions, and maybe your sales process is people actually on the phone talking to customers. That's fine, but you're not going to have any customers to talk to or try to sell online until you have massive volumes of traffic. Thousands and thousands a day is what it takes to get good data, even on what your customers want, and good feedback on what they want.

Three rules: massive traffic, qualified traffic, easy traffic. Best of success.