Are you struggling to gain traction with your digital efforts because you’re not receiving enough traffic? Do you receive constant complaints from your sales team about the lack of (or quality of) the leads you receive with the anemic level of traffic you are receiving? If these challenges sound familiar, you’re not alone and will definitely want to read on. Follow these 5 steps and I’m confident that your website will start to generate more quality leads.
1. Get to Know Your Personas Intimately
I’m not talking about the demographic breakdown of your target audience. I’m talking about taking a look at your entire customer base and beginning to segment those customers based on similar characteristics, like job they hold.
Let’s say you sell a customer relationship management (CRM) product, you’ll deal with very distinctly different audiences. You could be working with a VP of Sales who is trying to keep his finger on the pulse of the sales organization. You could be trying to showcase to a sales person how your product can make their job easier by eliminating a lot of administrative overhead. Or you could be selling to a Director of IT who is interested in the ease of installation. And wants to know much time they will have to spend training the VP of Sales or the sales people to use the product, so they don’t get swamped with stupid questions.
Once you’ve identified the main “buyers” that you’ll be speaking to, you’ll need to dig deeper and be able to answer the following questions:
- What does a day in their life look like?
- What are their challenges and pain points?
- Where do they go for information?
- What common objections do they have to your products or services?
- What questions are they seeking to answer at the different funnel positions?
- Who has influence over your persona and their decisions?
- How does their boss evaluate their success, and how can you make them a hero?
Your first instinct might be to run through and answer these questions superficially, but fight that urge! The more thought you put into understanding your personas, the better job you will be at attracting them.
2. Understand and Use Their Language
If your personas only spoke French would you try to carry on a conversation in English? Probably not! Don’t fall in the trap of spewing a bunch of gobbledy-gook and industry jargon to your customers and prospective customers. If you do, you’ll never connect with them in search engines and you’ll definitely decrease the likelihood that they’ll arrive at your website.
Once you’ve built out your personas and understand them intimately, spend time conducting keyword research around their challenges, the solutions you provide, and other relevant keywords they would use to find your organization online. Use this language in the key areas on the site, but most importantly use those keywords in the natural flow of your content. Make sure you don’t try to stuff them in the content because this will provide a negative experience for your visitors and almost guarantee they won’t return to you.
3. Connect With Influencers
When you’re thinking about building your traffic, you’ll find it can be very valuable to connect with people who have influence over large numbers of the specific personas you serve. Take the time to identify these influencers and invest the energy creating and developing a value-based relationship with them, you’ll put yourself in a position to dramatically increase the number of visitors to your website.
I like to look at it as the difference between finding new visitors on a “one-by-one” basis, versus finding them in groups of hundreds or thousands at a time. You’ll find the energy you invest is close to the same for each, but the outcome is drastically different.
4. Address Your On-Page SEO Elements
It’s important to do your part to let search engines know what your content is about, and the most efficient way to do this is by addressing each of the on-page SEO elements. Many companies invest a ton of time developing their strategy, directing the website build, refining the user experience, and ultimately creating a ton of value for their personas. But then they get to the optimization portion and utilize the same page titles, meta descriptions (if they have any), and skip out on the H1 tags, this is a problem. It means search engines will have trouble finding you. No matter how much value you create, if your personas can’t find you when they turn to the search engines, all that time and effort you invested was for nothing.
5. Create Value that Attracts Your Personas
When you approach the content and user experience on your website, you should trying to deliver an extreme amount of value to your personas. If you can do an effective enough job creating value, you’ll find that your personas will talk to their friends, share your content via social channels, and potentially become advocates for your company and your position as a thought leader. Don’t skimp when it comes to delivering value. If anything, keep a focus on delivering content that’s valuable enough that your personas would happily pay for it.
I’m confident that if you walk through these 5 steps and invest the time and energy into shaping up your own digital presence, you’ll quickly find yourself with a steady stream of fresh, new website visitors that will turn into quality leads. Need a little help shaping up your digital presence? We’re here to help and would love to have a chat. Request a consultation to get the conversation started!