Traffic & Conversion

Traffic Vs. Conversion

In my opinion, there are two key components to successful marketing:

• Driving Traffic
• Conversion

Driving traffic means getting in front of your target audience and convincing them to learn more about your company or your offerings.

Conversion is converting that traffic into actual sales for your company. Both are essential to your marketing success, and often one or both will be ignored by companies.

One of the biggest 🚩red flags🚩 we see when doing an initial Discovery Meeting with a prospect is hearing: “We’ve worked with so many different marketing companies and none of them have returned anything.” 

To us, that almost always indicates that the business doesn’t know how to convert their traffic into actual sales and customers. Many companies decide to invest in traffic thinking that traffic will get them sales, when in fact, traffic just gets them visibility. The conversion of that traffic is what gets them sales. On the flip side, many businesses focus so much on conversion and offering the best possible product they can to their clients, but they never actually focus on traffic. They never get in front of their prospect customers. So many companies these days run on word-of-mouth advertising. 

While word-of-mouth advertising can be extremely efficient and beneficial, it is not scalable. There is a limited number of people that you can reach with it, and so if all you’re doing is word-of-mouth advertising, you have significantly limited the growth potential of your company.

So Which Is More Important? Traffic Or Conversion?

The obvious answer is that you have to have both to have a successful marketing campaign. We can send you 10,000 potential customers but if you can’t convert them, you’re going to come back to our marketing agency and say: “Your marketing didn’t work.” Or you could convert every single customer that comes in, but if nobody ever hears about your company, then you’re not going to convert any new customers. 

So how do you increase your conversion? Well the first thing you have to know is your numbers.

When we have Discovery Meetings with prospects, so often we will ask them for numbers like their cost of acquisition, or the conversion rate for their home page. Most of the time, our prospects won’t even know how many people have been on the home page of their website.

You need to set up tracking. This can be Google Analytics, Google Search Console – I also recommend a Heat Map so you can see exactly how your customers are utilizing your website.

For one client, we found that almost 70% of people going onto the website were clicking onto one of two pages, and neither one of those pages were set up at all to convert people from visitors into actual customers.

You need to be able to track your sales metrics. How many inbound leads did you get? How many sales calls? How many people did you close? Tracking these KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are essential for understanding your conversion. Without knowing these numbers, you really have almost no hope of increasing conversion.

I Set Up Tracking And KPI’s, Now What?

After you have established your tracking and understand what numbers are important for you to track, you need to think about the psychological aspect of why people make decisions to move forward. Think about your own self.

The first thing that you have to do for anyone to even want to be interested in your offerings is to have an emotional “AHA” moment. You can talk technical all day long, but if they don’t have that emotional “AHA” moment of why they need your product, then you will never make a sale.

Almost never is the emotional “AHA” moment the forward-facing problem that the prospect says they have. You often times need to ask “Why?” five or six times to actually get down to the root pain and the root cause that customer is looking to solve, and then you need to be able to speak to that exact pain point.

So what’s an example of speaking to a client’s pain point? One example we use in LocalFi: SEO Digital Marketing Agency is we’ll ask the owner of a company: “If you had a sign outside your business that was broken and damaged, would you replace it immediately or just leave it up for years?” Almost everyone says: “Oh I would fix it immediately – of course, because it’s making my business look bad, it’s causing me to lose sales or hurt my reputation.” So then I ask them: “Well what about your online signs? Do you realize that you have signs that are incorrect, with wrong data all across the web that thousands of people are seeing every day or every month, versus the people who are driving by your business?” And then I actually show them a Business Scan, showing them exactly how their data is showing up all across the web.

You can use this Free Business Scan for yourself right now by visiting our Free Business Scan page.

This Business Scan, along with those questions, help the customer to realize that there are more signs out there than they thought. “I would never let a sign on my physical business be damaged and make my company look bad, so why am I allowing all these other signs that are being seen infinitely more than the signs outside my business to be wrong and incorrect?”

That emotional “AHA” moment, that recognition and the emotion that goes along with having that wrong sign out there render the customer interested in learning more about the offering. Then we can get into the technical aspects of how we fix the signs – how we’re improving all of those aspects of their business.

But we can’t get into that first, we have to have that first initial “AHA” moment of, “Hey, I need to do something differently because something’s not working here.” After you’ve figured out those emotional “AHA” moments for your customers, the real pain points, the emotional pain points that lay below the physical outward pain points that the prospect presents to you, then you can move on to the next step.

I Figured Out The Customer’s AHA Moment, Now What?

The next step is really building trust. The prospect has to trust you in order to want to move forward with you, and they have to have confidence that what you say you can do, you can back up with proof.

So how do you build trust? Well, the first and one of the most powerful ways is through testimonials. What we do for our customers at LocalFi is we find the 3 to 5 main objection points that almost every single prospect has, and then we go out and get testimonials from actual clients that talk about how those clients had the same objection but decided to move forward, and how great the results were. Social proof is so powerful in building trust, and reviews have become one of the main ways that people build their confidence and trust with companies.

Time For The Customer To Take Action

After you’ve built up that rapport, that likeability, and trust with your prospect, you need to give them a clear and precise pathway on how they can move forward with your company. If a prospect is confused about how to actually take you up on your offering, you’ve now lost that prospect.

A confused buyer is no buyer.

One of the most common things we see when people are sharing different offerings, especially right now after COVID-19, is that there’s a lot of confusion on how to even find out about how to take action on that company’s offering. People literally need step-by-step guides: Step 1 is we’re going to do this, Step 2 is we’re going to do this, Step 3 is we’re going to do this. Once people have these step-by-step guides on how the process will go from them being a prospect to them being an actual customer and getting your offering, that gives them so much more confidence and will increase your conversion by a ton!

Create A Script. Overcome Objections.

Finally it’s really understanding what your main objections are and having scripts to overcome those objections. One of the main objections that LocalFi commonly gets is “Hey I’ve been burned by marketers in the past – why would I trust you guys to do what you say you can?” Our answer to that now is: “Well, don’t take my word for it – I would hope that you would do your own diligence and research. Please Google us, see what other people are saying, and that should answer that question for you.” A lot of times people will say “Well, I already have researched and everybody is saying really positive things about your company.” Well, there you go.

So right there, I knew it was a main talking point, I knew that me talking myself up is what every other marketing company is doing, and I don’t need to. I have the social proof. I have the testimonials. And so I’m letting my true fans, my customers, sell the product for me through their testimonials and overcoming objections our main prospects have.

Congrats! You now understand the base concepts of conversion. Conversion is one of the most difficult tasks to conquer for a marketer. It takes incredible brain power, testing, re-testing, and perseverance to really increase your conversion.

How To Drive Traffic

Now that we’ve covered conversion, the next main topic is traffic. Russell Brunson probably said it in the simplest way. He said: “Traffic is easy – just find where your target market is congregating and put a big sign in front of them.” And in essence, that’s the basics of traffic.

Where are your prospects going, where are they congregating, and can you put a sign in front of them to drive them to your offering? Now, traffic usually needs to cause a pattern-interrupt. It needs to cause people to stop what they’re doing and think about what you’re doing for just a moment, because that pattern-interrupt can cause them to actually look at and pay attention to your offering.

So where are your prospects congregating? For local businesses, we’ve found that the #1 place consumers are congregating is on the local business platforms. This is Google Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc. – so many people are now utilizing these platforms to figure out which local company they’re going to do business with and where they’re going to spend their money. And that is why we position our customers at the very top of those platforms. There are many other marketing avenues, like radio, TV, paid ads, social media, word of mouth, conferences, trade shows, the list goes on and on. The question is, where is the best prospect buyer for your services?

So many people talk to us about social media and wanting to do social media marketing. However, in most cases, it’s not the most effective place for them to spend their money. In most cases, people on social media are browsers, they’re not buyers. Unless you have a great campaign, you’ve figured out conversion, you’ve figured out follow-up and you’re doing paid ads to get directly in front of actual buyers, social media usually is one of the worst places, in our opinion, to invest time and money to drive customers. Social media can be excellent for informing your current fan base and your current customer base about what’s going on in your company, but trying to drive traffic organically through social media is usually a huge time and money pit.

So what is social media good for? Well one, reputation. People are going to see what social media sites you are on when they look up your company, and so having a good presence to build that reputation – getting great reviews and having interactions with your current customer base – can be a great way to convince people to do business with you. But again, that’s a conversion tool, not a traffic tool.

Facebook can be great for informing your current customer base on new products offerings, specials, or events. That can actually be used as a traffic tool, as you’re informing your current customer base on other offerings. However, building that customer base and building that following online can take years and years before you can start seeing any type of monetization from it.

Now, paid ads can be extremely efficient in driving new traffic on Facebook, however it is very essential that you’re setting up the right marketing pathway for those ads. So many businesses drive ads directly to the home page, not realizing that the conversion rate of the home page is garbage. So they’re spending all this money to drive traffic that will never convert because they’ve never worked on their conversion.

If you’re going to spend money on Facebook, or any type of paid ad, you need to make sure you have a great funnel. Not only enticing people to take your first initial offering, or your first branded offer, but also having a great follow up system, an email or a call following up system. Since most people need to hear about something 3 to 7 times before they take action, if you just run an ad and they see your product once, very few people will buy that. You need to be able to get in front of them multiple times for them to want to take action on your offering.

You also have to recognize that there are very different types of traffic and depending on the traffic, the way that you convert them into customers will be very different.

Hot traffic, like referrals, can often be converted much easier because the trust factor is already there. They already trust you because they’ve been referred to you by someone they trust.

When you’re talking about medium/warm to cold traffic, you have to approach it very differently. You have to be able to build that trust up first before you can make that sale. This is why when driving traffic from Facebook ads or Google ads, it’s so important to have your expert indicators, your testimonials, your published articles, your TV and radio appearances, etc. People need to know that they can trust you before they’ll ever move forward in even learning what your offering is about.

When talking to cold traffic, it is extremely important to create a bridge. You need to have a product that helps build trust with the customer. Oftentimes this is what we’ll call a front-end offer. And usually this will be distributed for free or for at cost, or even a loss leader to get people in the door.

You’ve probably heard: “you need to build your email list” over and over and over again. And yet the most important list to build is your buyer’s list. There’s an 80% higher chance that someone will buy from you if they have already bought from you, versus a cold lead. Even if that initial buy is a $1 or $7 product or they’re buying a guide for the industry that you represent, “The Five Best Ways To Drive Traffic Online,” a free or one-dollar guide. This gets people to open up their wallet and at least commit, make that micro-commitment to you. And then with a good follow-up system, your chances of closing them on a higher product go up 80%.

So what is a front end offer that you can offer? A low, $1.00 to $7.00 item, where you can give tremendous value. Think about this: if someone buys a book from you that is over a hundred dollar value of information but they paid seven dollars for it, do you think they’d be interested in what they’d get if they paid a thousand dollars to you for a program?

So Should I Focus On Traffic Or Conversion?

So the final question, which is more important? Conversion or Traffic? And to us, they both go hand in hand. Without one, you cannot have tremendous success with one or the other. You have to be able to convert at a solid rate in order for traffic to make any sense, and you have to be able to send traffic if you even want to have enough people to convert anyone. So it is extremely important to work with a marketing agency or a coach that understands how important both aspects are. Very few people will help you with both. And without both, you’re going to continue to be on the never-ending hamster wheel of every marketing strategy you try and find that it is not working. It can work – it just needs to have the two components of good conversion and the right traffic.