Reasons Your Website Isn’t Converting Visitors Into Customers.

• After building a new website, most businesses want to see an instant result. They want to see an increment in return on investment. After all, that was the reason they built the website in the first place.

For most businesses, this dream never comes into reality. You realize that after several months there is still no noticeable improvement in sales volume. This raises serious questions. What did we do wrong? What are we missing? For most businesses, determining the root cause of this problem always proves difficult and impossible. The reality, however, is that the problems are mostly in-house. It mostly stems from a lack of communication between the website designers and the business itself.

In the initial planning process, little effort is made to clarify the objectives of building the website. A website is not something to be built and abandoned like a bewitched house. Setting key objectives with the website designers in the early stage of the negotiation will reveal most of the hidden causes of problems that are likely to arise in the future.

Take an e-commerce website as a case study. Every e-commerce website is built to provide products that consumers can easily purchase online. Thus reducing the hassle of going to the physical store location. Upon completion of the design of an e-commerce website, we do not expect customers to grow out of thin air. By setting key objectives to be achieved on the website, we can answer the “how-to” questions required to make these goals a reality.

The same logic applies to most businesses. The baker, artist and all other business owners all face the same problem of undetailed performance outline. By spelling out KPis, we can come up with strategies to make these objectives a reality. For example, if your goal, is to increase customer count by 20%, advertise a new product or raise brand awareness – it becomes easier to structure the website design in line with the set objectives.

This will lead us to the myriads of ways in which the website can be used to achieve the set goals.

At this point, the web developer will make us realize that the website needs more visibility to reach the target audience. This will then lead us to answer the “who” question; that is, knowing who our target audience are. At this juncture, we will come to the realization that we would need some form of advertisement or marketing to make our web presence noticeable to our target audience. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. Your web developer should offer you insights into the various forms of marketing required to advertise your product to your target audience. As you can see, asking the right question has a way of saving you money.

To achieve profitability on your website design effort, there is a need to infuse some form of online marketing into the process. Whether free or paid, depending on your objectives, you should be made to see the need to leverage some form of advertisement to increase the visibility of your website. This is easy to do. The forms of online marketing are numerous. Depending on your budget, goals and customers, you can choose between two broad digital marketing categories.

Free advertisement

This is a more direct form of marketing. It requires mostly the use of social media platforms to share ideas about your business. Using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn, you can attract the right kind of audience with zero cost. All that is required is a dedicated social media manager who can engage your audience constantly and effectively. Another brilliant method is content marketing. This involves creating engaging content that provides value and credibility to your website. The content can help improve your ranking on the Google search result page when users search for keywords related to your product offerings. Note that there is more to content marketing than I stated above, as it is an entire field on its own. However, if adequately utilized, it can be a gold mine for generating huge profit for your business.

Paid marketing

The other method is paid marketing also known as PPC (pay-per-click). This is a form of advertisement that requires the creation of online ad campaigns, by leveraging the huge user-base of major social media sites to advertise your business. The goal is to draw more traffic to your website that will eventually contribute to more conversions.

Most people use a mix of both free and paid advert. It proves to be the most effective when it comes to targeting the right audience while simultaneously reducing the budget. At the end of the day, we realize that asking the right set of questions often lead to greater insight when we are lost with regards to turning profitability on our website design strategy.