More Traffic, More Deals: Our Version of Digital Marketing 101

Back in 2007 when we just got started, we were a very small team with very little marketing knowledge. All we knew was how to create good designs that worked well and satisfied our customers.

Our very first customer base was relatives and friends in need of logos, name cards or flyer for their business. By delivering good results, we built long-term working relationships that hopefully, eventually would be enough reasons for them to introduce us to their own relatives and friends.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

Fast forward to a couple years later, we managed to generate quite a large client base by means of referrals and, let’s just say, luck. At the time, 85% of our customers came from personal connections and the rest were those who happened to stumble upon our website and see our work.

We were elated to see our website visitors converting into customers. Little did we know that our website was no different than a nice amusement park in the middle of a jungle with no signage nor billboard to let passers-by know about our existence!

We soon realized that relying solely on personal connections was no way to make sustainable business. And our website did not help much either.

No matter how good it is, any website is just one of over billions of website on the world wide web today. With that knowledge, we started digging for more information on how to generate more sales through our website. Long story short, we finally understood the importance of sales funnel in garnering great amount of visitors and achieving good conversion rate.

A Digital Sales Funnel looks something like this:

Here are what we’ve been doing to maximize our website’s role in generating more sales along the sales funnel.

Step 1: Awareness
Let them know we exist

First thing we needed to do was improve our website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that our website could appear on the first page of Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) for certain search keywords related to our business.

The idea was to get our website ranking as high as possible on Google SERP, hence the higher chance of Google search users finding it and paying us a visit.

It did take a while to get our website up there, so we decided to put it on Google’s paid advertisement in a method called Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

With SEM, you’re basically putting a link to your website above all search results on Google SERP (text ad) or banners linking to your website on certain high traffic websites (Google Display Network).

SEM does the trick instantly and it works especially well for high competition keywords, but as most advertisements go, the clicks stops happening when you stop paying.

SEO is the more organic way. It may take some time and crossing 200 or so things off a to-do list to raise a website’s SERP ranking organically, but the payoff is definitely a long lasting one.

After crossing off 200 or so things off a to-do list, we’re now doing quite well on Google SERP. Try searching for “graphic design jakarta” on Google and see how our website is doing on Google SERP for that particular keyword. Or you can just look below.

If you’re curious about what kind of improvements can be done to your website to make it more search-engine-friendly, you could go to seositecheckup.com and see for yourself. Although there are still some things left to work on, our website’s SEO report turned out quite OK.

Do you still have any questions about SEO and SEM? Contact us by clicking here.

Step 2: Consideration
Content is—still, and always will be—king

So, we finally got more and more people to visit our website. Next up was making sure that the website itself was convincing enough for people to actually consider using our services and engage with us one way or another.

We are currently working on making our website’s content even better, so stay tuned for that! In the meantime, here are some insights from Kissmetrics that you need to know when it comes to website visitors:

INSIGHT #1: You have 0-8 seconds to grab their attention with a compelling headline and landing page. After 8 seconds, the majority of visitors leave.

Make your unique value proposition(s) clear. Visitors should be able to clearly and immediately see on your headline and your homepage or landing page why they should do business with you and the benefit of it.
A 1 second delay in your site speed can result in a 7% reduction in engagement, so make sure that all elements (especially graphics or videos) are optimized in size.

INSIGHT #2: Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy.

Your content should be able to guide them through their buyer’s journey. In a lot of cases, only three things are necessary: an effective headline, meaningful graphics and a clear call-to-action button; but sometimes it takes more steps and more time.
Provide additional value through your content, articles and updates in order to keep them engaged and keep your website on top of their minds until they are finally ready to buy.

INSIGHT #3: There are certain elements that are proven to significantly increase conversion rate.

• Product videos can increase purchases of the product by 144%.
• Implementing a “Chat Now” button increased free signup form fills by 31%.
• Including discount information in the title (e.g. ‘15% off Product A’ instead of ‘Product A’) increased add to cart conversions by 148.3%.
• Benefits, social proof and credibility indicators led to a 144.1% improvement on landing pages.
• Putting people on your homepage can have a huge impact on conversions.
• Showing testimonials can drive validation.
• Using natural language on forms has been shown to increase conversions by 25-40%.
• Having a nice mobile site can double conversions.
• Segmenting your users can increase conversion rates by giving more relevant content each user.
• Putting your call-to-action button can really improve conversions.

INSIGHT #4: A/B testing is becoming the preferred method that has brought a lot of the companies the most success.

Test out two/more variations and combinations of elements (headlines, graphics, calls-to-actions, etc.) for a set amount of time and stick with the ones that lead to the most engagement.

Step 3: Conversion
Turning audience into clients

Whether through engagement or initial purchase, visitors have now become our audience who already trust our company and have a good idea about the values of our services. The next step might be more challenging but is definitely worth doing to drive purchase or more of them.

The goal is building authority, trust and connection between our company and the audience by constantly provide them with personalized information, updates and motivating stories that are suitable with their interest. Here, we are trying to convert warm traffic into hot traffic.

This step goes beyond the website; it actually is the one of the most effective ways to use the email database that we got from the website (through project inquiry or newsletter subscription) and gradually turn them into sales or more sales.

What we did is give away various information and insights that goes hand in hand with our services in helping them achieve their goal. By including links that take them back to our website, we are also keeping them engaged with other updates that we may have put up there.

Now that the audience is becoming more and more familiar with our services and content, we just need to nudge them to a certain direction, depending on their interest. Add some elements of incentive or time urgency (real ones always work best), and they’re well on their way to purchase.

For example, we would send reminders to start a calendar design project around mid-year considering printers are usually busy by the end of the year.

Step 4: Loyalty
Gaining loyal customers

We’ve come full circle. It’s time to make sure that the cycle continues on and doesn’t break.

Back in the day, our focus was solely on delivering great results and hoping that they were enough reasons for us to be introduced into their colleagues. Now we’ve figured out that there’s a method to it as well.

On one of our next articles, we’ll show you how to get existing clients’ loyalty until the point of referring us to their circle. Make sure that you don’t miss it by subscribing to our blog (click here and scroll to the bottom) and following us on Instagram.

By utilizing the power of Digital Sales Funnel, we are able to reach broader audience that is unreachable through offline channels. Contact us for more information on how we can apply this method to maximize your website’s role through digital marketing.