Top 5 Reasons You’re Not Driving Conversions

You’ve created loads of great content and set up your website. Your landing pages have a great design. Leads should be pouring in, right? Not necessarily. When you’re setting up an inbound marketing program, there are many moving parts you have to take into consideration in order to set yourself up as a thought leader and lead generating powerhouse. If you’re struggling to drive conversions, check out these 5 reasons why your visitors might not be converting.

1. You haven’t researched your target audience

Before creating any content, strategizing the design of your website or promoting conversion opportunities, you need to know who you’re trying to reach. Creating buyer personas, or semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers, can help tremendously. In order to do this, you’ll have to research your current customer base and your target audience. Identify their demographics, where they spend time online, their goals, common questions they have, their pain points and how your product or service can help them.

The research you conduct should drive your content creation. Your goal should be to answer your target audience’s questions and create educational, helpful content that interests them. Additionally, you’ll want to ensure that your audience can find said content – and this leads me to my next point.

2. Your content isn’t optimized

Let’s say you’re writing a blog post for your college or university, aimed at answering potential students’ questions about “college financial aid options” or you’re writing a blog post for your hospital, aimed at answering potential patients’ questions about “the best knee surgeons.” It’s important to ensure that your blog post content contains relevant keywords that your potential audience might be searching for, such as “college financial aid options” or “best knee surgeons.”

Be careful not to overstuff your content with these keywords – Google recognizes “keyword stuffing” and actually favors quality, information-rich content over content with a high keyword density. Include your target keyword in the title or H1 header of your content, and pepper it throughout.

3. You’re lacking calls-to-action

Think about your website, landing pages and various pieces of content – premium content, blog posts, etc. Do you encourage your visitors or readers to take action?

On your website, do you have calls-to-action (CTAs) to encourage visitors to “apply now” or “schedule a campus tour” (if you’re a college or university), “schedule an appointment” (if you’re a healthcare organization) or “request a demo” (if you’re a technology company that offers software products)? Think about what you want your website visitors to do, and plan their conversion path accordingly with related CTAs.

Once potential leads hit your landing pages, which likely gate and promote your premium content offers, a blog subscription, demo requests, consultations, etc., is there a form for them to fill out with a related “Download Now” or “Submit” button? This is how you will capture their contact information and will allow you to market to them in the future. If your landing pages lack CTAs, you may be confusing your visitors, causing them to navigate away without completing their download or request.

Each of your blog posts should also include a CTA. For example, if you’re writing about the college financial aid process, include a CTA at the end to download your college financial aid checklist.

4. You’re not taking the buyer’s journey into consideration

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to ignore the buyer’s journey – the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to a purchase. You need to target people in different stages of the journey in different ways, with different types of content and offers.

In an effort to convert visitors into leads, you should be focusing on the awareness stage – this is when users are seeking educational, third-party, vendor-neutral content such as guides or eBooks, so you shouldn’t bombard them with an overly sales-y case study or product comparison. Once visitors have become leads, your goal should be to advance them through the consideration and decision stages, ultimately ending in converting them as customers.

5. You’re not using an inbound approach

In line with taking the buyer’s journey into account and targeting people in different stages in different ways, taking an inbound marketing approach is key – this will help you provide your audience with the right content, in the right place at the right time.

Unlike interruptive traditional outbound marketing tactics such as mass emails, pop-up ads, direct mailers and TV commercials, inbound marketing is all about creating and sharing relevant, targeted content online and with a specific audience. Taking our previous four points into consideration – researching your audience, optimizing your content, utilizing CTAs and focusing on the buyer’s journey – will drive your inbound marketing efforts.

If you’re frustrated with a lack of conversions, take a step back and look at your overall marketing strategy and process – perhaps it’s due to one of the reasons we’ve highlighted above. Test different aspects of your marketing strategy and refine it accordingly. Looking for help? We’d love to talk with you about your marketing goals and strategy – contact us today and let us know how we can help!

Updated: Apr 13, 2022