Stay at home orders mean more eyes on your advertising and a drastic increase in impressions. So how can you turn those impressions into increased conversions, and retain those spenders?
You’ll have to focus on improving your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). This means, addressing all of the ways people are observing your brand and optimizing those channels around the increased eye traffic.
Drive Social Media Conversions
People staying at home and working at home are undeniably engaging more with social media. In a time of separation and distancing, we’re more desperate than ever to see what our peers are up to.
Hopefully, you’ve gotten ahead of this and already started increasing your organic and paid social media presence. Any impression is a good one, but targeted social advertising will give you the most valuable impressions. These leads will take the least amount of work to convert into spenders, since the social platform’s tools have already narrowed down your audience to your desired one.
Keep wording simple
One of the ways you can make your posts and social ads even more digestible is to simplify your wording. Don’t complicate your verbiage with words like “utilize” instead of just “use.” No matter how much you want to appear professional, social media isn’t the place to worry about that.
A valuable tool to help you simplify your messaging is the Hemingway Editor. This website and app reads your wording, grades its readability, and suggests simpler words and improved phrasing. This can be particularly handy if you need to stay under a character limit.
Don’t forget the CTA
Because the goal is to turn a viewer into a spender, you need to always have a fitting and powerful call to action. The person needs to understand what they’re getting into when they move from ad to website or form. The clickthrough needs to align with the content they stopped scrolling to read, after all. Deception is never the answer.
For advice on developing strong CTA’s, such as ones with urgency, check out this post.
Prepare your website for the traffic
Once people take action and click through or search up your website, the experience needs to be good. Between beefing up your site’s stability and designing it for usability, now is the time to give your website some love.
Speed up your pages
The masses are flooding the collective internet with clicks and scrolls right now. Even if your website isn’t being greatly impacted by increased traffic, it’s still a good time to focus on optimization. The last thing you want a new potential customer to see when they visit your website is a lack of graphics, or even worse… an error code.
Your website, and all others, are hosted by a web hosting company that surely hosts hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other websites. Your website’s stability is dependent on that host’s ability to deliver your site to users. So as all websites within the world wide web get bogged down together, your site needs to be ready for potential slowdowns.
Start by auditing your site’s speed. You can do this yourself by visiting your pages, but a full professional audit will allow you to identify the speed pain points slowing you down. This can include things such as image files that are unnecessarily large and plugins that would work just as well as an embed.
Be mobile friendly
As an interactive medium, most of your web traffic is going to come from social click throughs. This leads us to the important fact that almost all social media usage is done on a mobile device. Data shows that people use their mobile device 80 percent of the time for social media.
This means that as people quarantine, your mobile traffic is likely going to outweigh desktop traffic. Which makes a mobile friendly web experience more important than ever. As an added bonus, mobile friendly websites rank higher in google search results.
Whatever website builder or hosting platform you use for your website already likely takes mobile design into account. But this is an automated process. And the best mobile websites were built with mobile in mind first, then desktop.
Similar to load speed, give your site a mobile friendliness audit. This can even be done on a desktop by shrinking your browser’s window size down to look like a phone. As a tip, the aspect ratio size for most recent phones is 18:9. Older phones (pre iPhone X, for example) are 16:9, which still works on newer sizes. 16:9 phones are also the same size as standard monitors and television sets, just oriented vertically.
Give your web pages a look at this vertical sizing and see how your assets adjust and resize. Are your buttons and links large enough for a finger to tap on comfortably? Do your logos and images resize in a way they are still readable?
The truth is, internet-goers are becoming subconsciously used to pages that were built first for mobile, but viewed on a desktop. This is why most articles you read compress content into the middle, leaving a ton of whitespace around the sides. You likely have been finding websites to look cleaner over the last few years, without even giving thought to why. It all comes back to mobile.
Analyze your conversions
In the end, the most important thing you can be doing is looking at your data. Where are people coming from when they visit you online or in person?
Where did they discover you? How long are they spending on your feed or content? You have to track your customers’ journey. Google has shown that the top 10% of well-tracked accounts on google ads have a conversion rate of over 20%.
Your conversions should be easily trackable if you’re utilizing the right tools to drive clicks and other forms of direct engagement from prospective customers. So build up your online presence for both your website and social channels, and keep an eye on your conversions. This is an investment, and the current world circumstances might be setting you up for long term success.