How to Build a Marketing Strategy that Guarantees Conversions

Let’s get one thing straight right now… If you’ve got a piece of shit product that you’re trying to sell to the wrong people, for the wrong amount of money, I can’t help you.

Instead, what I’m offering in this article is a process you can use that – when applied correctly – virtually guarantees conversions from your digital marketing efforts. If you’re ready to put in the effort, there’s no reason you can’t use this approach to make money selling products and services online.

Ready to dive in? Let’s get started…

Step #1 – Establish product-market fit

Plenty of marketers out there think that making sales online comes down to the tools you use – as if adding the right landing page creation tool or a new pop-under banner program is the secret to profitability that will somehow make up for a weak product-market fit.

Unfortunately, it isn’t the mechanics of your site that lead to sales. Although image matters, when it comes down to it, sales result from matching up a market segment with a problem to a product that solves their issues and that they can acquire without too much pain. Old school marketers call this “product-market fit,” and it’s a vital component to have in place before you begin your content marketing campaigns.

Let’s look at an example to see what makes product-market fit so important… Say you run a skin care line that’s recently decided to enter the teen market. You try to repurpose your high-end, anti-aging, fine-line-fighting moisturizer for younger prospects, only to find that a) they aren’t concerned about aging, and b) they don’t have the disposable income to spend on top-of-the-line products.

In this instance, you could write all the blog posts in the world, produce the best infographics ever seen and come up with the world’s catchiest viral video to promote your brand, and none of it would matter because there’s no market for your product. Without first establishing product-market fit, you’d be throwing away your time and money on marketing campaigns that aren’t going to do a thing for your business.

If you’re still at this initial stage in your startup’s growth, use any of the following strategies to test this important consideration:

• Traditional market research. Old school tactics like focus groups and customer surveys can be expensive, but they’ll tell you right away if a market exists for your product – before you have the chance to throw more money away on a bad idea.
• Run sales tests. If you already have a product that’s actively being sold on your website, test different price points using split test protocols. If none of your variations prove more successful than the others, it’s not your pricing that’s preventing sales – it’s your product.
• Test with paid ads. If, on the other hand, you don’t yet have your product, consider setting up a test landing page with details of the product as you envision them, along with a contact form. Send paid traffic to the site and gauge the effectiveness of your product-market fit by counting the number of form submissions received compared to the web page’s total visitors.
• Track the Net Promoter Score (NPS) of your product or your competitor’s. The NPS is used to measure loyalty between a company and its customers. Use tools like Wootric to measure this, and if your score is low (anything between 0 and -100), there’s a good chance your product-market fit is off. Identifying competitors with higher NPSs can show you where you’re going wrong.

Of course, it should be noted that finding product-market fit isn’t a one-off event – you’re not going to hit some magical point where things click into place and you’re set for the rest of your company’s existence.

Product-market fit must evolve as the needs of your customers grow and change. Periodically check in with the techniques above, and make continually improvement a part of the culture of your company.

Step #2 – Hone your offer

So now, if you’ve completed Step #1, you should be relatively certain that you’ve got a product your customers will be interested in buying. Next, you’ve got to put together a killer offer that they won’t be able to refuse.

Creating an effective marketing offer is as much an art as it is a science. Copywriting principles come into play, as do elements of human psychology and design work. And while it’s nearly impossible to create an offer template that will work in all instances, consider that all of the following questions must be addressed as you present your offer to your prospects:

• What am I getting? Understandably, your offer needs to detail exactly what is being exchanged. This might be just your primary product, but it might also include any bonuses you’re throwing in or any upsells you’ve convinced your prospect to buy.
• Why would I want that? In our skin care example above, teenagers weren’t interested in the company’s moisturizer because it didn’t appeal to their perceived needs. Make sure part of your offer clearly conveys why prospects should purchase, whether you do so by stating your product’s benefits, appealing to your audience’s pain points or using some combination of other tactics.
• How will you take care of me? Before prospects hand over their hard-earned money, they want to be reassured that they’re making the right decision. Maybe you do this by offering buyers a money-back guarantee or by walking them through what will happen after the transaction is complete. You may even want to reference testimonials or positive customer reviews to get them onboard. Whatever approach you take, the goal here is to minimize the obstacles that would otherwise prevent the sale from occurring.
• Why should I act now? You don’t just want prospects to buy – you want them to buy now! According to a FinancesOnline infographic, shopping cart abandonment accounts for $4 billion in worldwide lost revenues. The last thing you want is for prospects to walk away before pulling the trigger, which is why your offer must encourage immediate action (possibly through the use of scarcity tactics or time-sensitive promotions).

Answering all these questions in a concise, motivating offer is a tremendous challenge, but some of the following sales techniques can improve its efficiency:

• Price normalization. Suppose you’ve got a high dollar product and a target customer that balks at spending the extra cash. One way to circumvent this objection is to normalize the price by comparing it to a more “everyday” purchase. If you’re selling a $299 product, you could do this by stating, “For less than the price of a single coffee each week…”
• Price differentiation. Have you ever come across a product pricing page that includes three or more pricing tiers, with the highest-priced package offering more bells and whistles than the lowest? There’s a good chance you have, because it’s a strategy that works. People like to avoid being seen as extreme, so they tend to gravitate towards the middle package. If you have a single product you were going to sell at $299, come up with a stripped down version to price at $299, a package with added features to sell at $499 and price your original offering at $399. You might be surprised to find that you’ll make more money, just because you’ve changed the perceived value of your offering.
• Price anchoring. One way to make your prices seem more reasonable is to tie them to a real world example in order to put them into perspective. Say you’re a branding firm that charges $9,500 for an identity package and basic website design. That might seem like a lot to some potential customers, but using a statement like, “Brands like Coca Cola and Pepsi spend millions perfecting their brands – it doesn’t even take five figures to work with us!” can help mitigate its impact.
• Appeal to pain points. Our fears are some of our most powerful motivators (just ask the guy who’s spent thousands on hair treatments to avoid looking like he’s growing older!). Addressing your audience’s pain points in your offer or call to action can be a powerful way to drive sales, though doing so effectively requires a light touch. Be subtle, but do make it clear that your product will help mitigate – or eliminate entirely – a fear that your audience members hold dear.
• Punch up your language. Which of the following calls to action is more compelling: “Lose weight now by buying my protein powder!” or “Punch fat in its face with my no-hunger protein solution!” I’m hoping you’ve chosen the second option and that you can see from it how powerful the words you choose can be. If the language on your landing page is at all flat, replace it with the power words that will help spur your prospects on to action.

These four practices are only a taste of the different ways psychology principles can be used to guarantee website conversions. If you’re interested in doing some more reading on the (truly fascinating) subject, the following articles will give you a good primer:

• Jeremy Said – “Four Psychological Triggers on Your Landing Pages that are Turning Customers Away”
• Copyblogger – “6 Proven Ways to Boost the Conversion Rates of Your Call-to-Action Buttons”
• MarketingLand – “8 Brain Triggers Guaranteed to Boost Your Social Media Marketing”
• MarketingLand – “5 More Brain Triggers to Drive Conversions on Your Website or Landing Page”
• SocialTriggers – “The Dumb Pricing Mistake People Make (And How to Fix It)”

Step #3 – Build your online collateral

Now, it’s time to put all of your newfound offer-building knowledge to the test. Obviously, you probably already have a website to host your product, but you’ll also need to build out all of the following elements:

• A landing page that sells your product
• Your call-to-action button
• Your shopping cart or checkout system
• The “thank you” pages prospects land on after converting
• A follow-up sequence that helps onboard new customers (if your product requires training to use) or that reinforces the purchase with additional branded content

And that’s all without counting the elements needed to directly form your sales funnel, like your “About” page or your business blog!

So what do we know about website design and how it influences the conversion rate process? Well, the news isn’t good. According to research gathered by Kinesis:

• 75% of users admit to making judgements about a company’s credibility based on their website design.
• 85% of B2B customers search the web before making a purchase decision.
• 94% of a website’s users first impressions are design-related.

If you want to guarantee conversions, you can’t afford to skimp on your website’s design. That may sound like common sense, but the number of bad sites I see out there every day leads me to believe that this message hasn’t fully reached all industries and verticals.

The problem, of course, is that good website design is subjective. There are some broad principles you can apply – for example, using images of faces pointing in different directions to control where your prospects are looking – but you must ultimately find the place where aesthetically-pleasing design elements support your sales funnels by encouraging conversions.

The best way to do this is to hire a conversion-focused designer or growth hacker who has experience building sites in a way that’s visually appealing and results-oriented. It’s a skill set that not all people have, but that also makes these designers more expensive than traditional looks-only professionals. If, instead, you decide to go it on your own, the following resources will give you a quick introduction:

• SocialTriggers – “The #1 Conversion Killer In Your Web Design (Are You at Risk?)”
• Entrepreneur – “Better Website Conversion Rates Depend on Better Website Design”
• ConversionXL – “Designing Your Website Flow to Meet Your Conversion Needs”
• CrazyEgg – “Are You Making These Conversion Killing Mistakes?”
• VWO – “5 Design Principles to Instantly Boost the Conversion Rate of Your Website”

Step #4 – Track your conversions

As your website is being designed to optimize conversions, you’ll also want to install the tools needed to help measure the number of new customers you acquire, as well as where they’re coming from.

(Just a note – I’ve been discussing conversions in the form of sales throughout this article, but that isn’t the only type of conversion you may want to track. The process described here can be applied to any website, whether you’re trying to increase email newsletter subscriptions, whitepaper downloads or some other metric.)

There are dozens of different conversion tracking tools out there, and the option that’s right for you will depend largely on the complexity of your conversion process. If you’re selling a single product on a single landing page, for example, Google Analytics can be configured to register a conversion whenever a visitor lands on your designated “thank you” page, as well as show you the different paths through your website each visitor took before making a purchase.

On the other hand, if you’ve got hundreds of products spread across thousands of landing pages, a more complex program like Improvely or Convertro may be necessary. Most marketing automation programs like Marketo and Eloqua come with this capability as well; if your organization already uses one of these systems, you may not need a separate program.

For the purposes of this process, we’re tracking conversions so that we can see whether the changes we’ll make in the next step lead to more or fewer conversions. However, when you start tracking conversion data, you can also use this information to decide how to improve your digital marketing efforts in the future.

Suppose you can see, according to your conversion tracking program, that 10% of the people who went on to make purchases on your site entered through Facebook, while only 2% of your eventual customers came from Twitter. Seeing this, you might decide to focus your marketing efforts more heavily on Facebook than on Twitter in the future.

But let me offer you one word of caution here… Most conversion tracking programs perform poorly from an attribution standpoint. In the case above, it could be that the biggest contributing factor to the likelihood of a prospect converting was reaching a specific sales-oriented blog post – not which social network the visit originated from. If you were to then focus your efforts on courting specific social visitors, you’d be missing out on a major opportunity to create additional blog posts that have a similar impact as the one driving most of your sales.

Unfortunately, there’s no perfect solution to the issue of multi-touch attribution modeling, though some programs come closer than others. I’m not telling you this so that you can tear your hair out trying to figure out exactly which elements in your funnel deserve credit for a sale, but so that you know to take this information with a grain of salt as you work to improve your conversion rate.

Step #5 – Test your results

Now, if you’ve been following along with this process, you should have an offer and call to action that will help convince prospects of your product-market fit, as well as a website that takes advantage of conversion-oriented design principles to maximize sales and a tracking process enabled to determine when these conversion occur.

But the thing is, everything you’ve created so far is based on your best guesses about the factors and elements that will be most persuasive to your target audience. And guesses don’t guarantee conversions!

You could have a truly inspired website design, but if an image you’ve used or a color you’ve chosen doesn’t resonate with your prospective buyers, they’re not going to convert. The only way to determine whether your selections represent the most effective possible combination is through split testing.

Literally thousands upon thousands of articles have been written about split testing, so I’m not going to rehash all that here. If you don’t know how to run a split test yet, simply Google “how to split test,” and I’m sure you’ll come up with all the resources you need.

Instead, I want to look at what you should be testing – not how you should do it. And while you’ve got a virtually unlimited number of elements that can be tested, I recommend starting with the following “Big 5:”

• Your call to action
• Your payment buttons
• Your landing page headline
• Your offer
• Your price point

Scoring a big win improving one of these five elements is likely to have a bigger impact on your business’s bottom line than, say, testing whether you put your landing page before or after your “About” page on your site’s navigation bar. But if you’ve run through all of the five items listed above and want to expand your efforts, any of the following variables can be tested as well:

• Your website’s color scheme
• The images you use on your site
• Your font
• The color of your font
• Your hyperlink color
• The length of your content
• Free versus gated content
• The number of fields in your opt-in form
• The inclusion of an anti-spam or privacy policy
• The bullet points used in your lists
• Positive versus negative messaging
• The use of multimedia files (for example, videos versus images)
• The length of your paragraphs
• Personal photos versus stock photos
• The number of steps in your funnel
• Vertical versus horizontal navigation
• The size and placement of your social icons

Will all of these steps, taken together, guarantee your conversions. Again, the answer is no – nothing in life or online is guaranteed. That said, you’d be hard pressed to find a better formula for success than to find a product your market will love, figure out how to pitch it to them in the most appealing way possible, create the optimal environment for sales to occur, measure your results and then test different variations to improve them as much as possible. Follow these steps and your digital marketing results are almost certain to improve.

What other steps or recommendations would you add to this process? Share your suggestions by leaving a comment below!