How Measuring Your Online Marketing Strategy Can Save Your Website | Chelsea Nicole Studios

If You’re Not Measuring Your Success – You’re Not Doing it Right.

A prospect who found us online came into our Worcester office yesterday to see if we could help him with his online marketing strategy. He had a nice looking website, geotargeted landing pages and he had just completed a year-long contract with an SEO firm out of Chicago.

Yet, he was frustrated. The monthly reports he was getting were telling him that he was getting decent traffic – but he was getting no business from his website. No leads for an entire year working with his previous online marketing company?

My first question was, of course, what’s a lead to you? What are the call-to-action points on your website? How does a customer become a lead through your website? How are you measuring your success?

It seems that the previous company left these important questions to the wind, which leads us to our first problem:

Problem: You Have Nothing to Measure

Just have a nice looking website is not enough. Unless you are Wikipedia, your website has to do something more than just inform. You have to tell your prospects what you want them to do and how to do it. It sounds basic, but you’d be surprised how many websites do not include measurable calls to action in their online marketing strategy.

Ask yourself exactly what you want your customer to do when they go to your website. What is the ultimate goal? More downloads, more phone calls, more sales? Do you want them to pick up the phone and call you, fill out a form, or click a button?

Determine what success means to your business. Then measure your success rate.

Solution: Create Actionable Material

Tell the user exactly what to do, and make it super easy for them to take action. Don’t make your prospects work at becoming a customer. Think of the entire customer experience from beginning to end, and how you can guide them through the sales funnel.

A good rule of thumb is to create a minimum of 3 calls to action (CTAs) that are highly visible on every page. Take this optometry website as an example. The CTAs are color coded and placed on every page of the site. Using different colors for each CTA gives a visual consistency on what action to take – order lenses is always gray; make an appointment is orange, and patient portal is blue.

Before we started developing this website, we asked our client what action he wanted visitors to take. We determined the top three actions, and then placed these three conversion points throughout the website.

The website’s online marketing measurement of success is the rate in which visitors come to the website and perform one of these three actions. In other words, the conversion rate. With this clear measure of success, our client will never be left wondering what his website’s return on investment is.

Lickteig Family Eyecare – Website ReDesign:

Use Conversion Rates

A creative marketing strategy will usually include a blog, and a social media strategy. It may be fun to see your followers rise and traffic increase, but if those followers are merely observing and they are taking no action on your content, who cares?

Instead, use conversion rates to measure your online marketing strategy’s success.

When you create actionable material like call to action buttons, you can measure your success through how well your website is converting visitors to leads. With the website example above, we can track how many people are accessing the patient portal, ordering contact lenses online, and scheduling appointments through the website.

We can then create ‘Goals’ in Google Analytics that measure the rate of visitors who are taking action on our content. That conversion rate is a good measurement of your online marketing strategy’s success.

With Google Analytics, you can track your visitors behavior throughout the entire sales process and identify problems and weak spots. Do you find that customer’s keep dropping off on a certain page before filling out that form or pushing that button? Change that page around and perform a split test to see what design works best. I’ve seen conversion rates jump after simply changing a submit button from blue to red and making it larger. Try, Test, Measure, Improve.

Chelsea Nicole Studios Will Evaluate Your Current Online Marketing Strategy for FREE

This is just one example of how we can integrate actionable material into your website that will improve your online marketing strategy and bring you more leads. The same philosophy can be done with other online marketing campaigns such as social media and e-mail marketing. To have Chelsea Nicole Studios turn your current website into a successful lead generating platform for your business, contact us today.