5 Ways Conversion Takes Market Share Like Candy From A Baby

They are out there, and they are not nice. They seek to take food from the mouths of your children and to put your career at risk. They are your online competitors, and they won’t think twice about leaving you crying helplessly as they eat your ice cream cone.

In every industry, at least one business is embracing conversion disciplines and dominating their marketplace online. Extra Space is doing it to Storage, Inc. and someone is making the move in your industry. Is it you?

These stone cold sharks are refining the online formula that works best with their prospects — and yours.

They are trying new things, testing theories and making decisions based on data, data provided by the behavior of the very visitors that you and they covet.

With that formula, they can create online properties that grab customers like slipping a fruit rollup from a sleeping toddler. Allow me to explain.

They Pay Less For The Exact Same Advertising

High converting sites may use the same advertising venues, the same agencies, heck, they may vie for the exact same space. But because they have optimized their sites to create more conversion, they wind up with much higher ROI from their advertising dollars….meaning their net advertising cost is lower.

Sites that use best conversion practices know how to use advertising as well as the structure, design and content of their sites to attract qualified prospects and lead them gently down the conversion funnel, directing them toward the products and services they might be interested in.

They know that they’re paying for “impressions” but that if the visitor clicks, sniffs, and clicks away, the money that went to lure that visitor is wasted. So if those sites put an ad out there, they’re ready. When a prospect takes the bait, they engage them right away with sites that solve these visitors’ problems.

They Hit Your Prospects Several Times To Your One Touch

Even though they pay less for their visitors, they are greedy about hanging on to them. They are signing people up for a newsletter, offering deals by email and are connecting on social media. Since they are focused on the conversions that build relationship beyond just sales, they look for ways to forge that relationship.

And then they carry on the conversation. They may send email frequently, but aren’t seen as spammers. They are helpful on social media.

High converting sites know that part of the formula for marketing success is continually providing value that builds trust. They know if they provide great content, they can pop up in prospects’ email inboxes regularly without being seen as spammers.

They’ll have the revered place of purveyors of valuable information—someone focused on offering really useful advice, insights and offers their prospects can use rather than someone constantly pushing unwelcome products. Because they’ve earned this place with their relevant content, prospects welcome the emails and newsletters that keep them top of mind and cement the relationship even more.

Your customers may be sharing coffee and crullers with those sites before you know it.

Their Content is About Their Prospects, Not Themselves

High converting sites know that every piece of their content has to be prospect-centric. They create their websites in a way their customers like to navigate. They use the keywords their customers would use to find their products and services—not the secret, obscure words used among industry insiders or even marketers.

They think long and hard about the personas that make up their top customers and what those personas need to know, hear, think, feel, to arrive comfortably at a decision to engage with them. And, eventually, to buy from them…again and again…and recommend them to friends.

Once upon a time, these sites might have done a lot of chest thumping: “We’re the best. We have the most experienced staff. We’ve been around the longest.” But now that they’ve learned the conversion formula, they only use that information where it would help their prospects. The rest of their content focuses on benefits they can bring their customers.

Your customers may see what these sites do and think “I want to go where I’m loved.”

They Don’t Make Mistakes More Than Once

High converting sites know that online marketing is science and science is all about testing. Try content, measure the results. Test an email strategy, measure how often it gets opened, then measure how often it leads to the next conversion action. Redesign some part of the page, measure changes in analytics in terms of bounce rates or next steps in the conversion funnel.

Perhaps this formula works better at room temperature, colder or warmer. These sites aren’t content to take an action with their web presence and scratch their heads when the conversions don’t increase. They learn from their mistakes. They have both the fancy tools and the people who know how to use them.

Thomas Edison said he didn’t fail 1,000 times; he simply learned 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb. Sites like this get incrementally stronger and gather more market share with each effort and test.

They Are Waiting On SERPs For Your Dissatisfied Visitors

These sites know that Google and Bing are becoming the home page for prospects. They optimize their interior pages, pages that deliver solutions to searchers’ problems. They either rank for the right terms or advertise on them. They use a variety of landing pages that meet a searcher right where they are. They have great quality scores.

If you don’t grab these searchers, they will. And they won’t let go.

High-converting sites know creativity on site is only useful after they’ve considered what a visitor wants. People on a search generally don’t want some Picasso-esque site that tickles their creative fancy. They don’t usually want to see a homepage. They want easy-to-access, comprehendible solutions.

So you can see, these sites have all the ingredients to take your market share without much of a fight…. The good news is, you can cook up this formula in your lab, too!

Take The Candy First

For online marketing, and search marketing in particular, conversion is a science. There are established elements, formulas, principles, online marketers can use in their own laboratories to concoct marketing success.

Once you have the formula, and know how to produce it, you’re gold. It’s like someone getting the formula for penicillin. They don’t have to be Alexander Flemming , Howard Florey or Ernst Chain, they can make antibiotics in their own labs, using just the formula.

Are you experimenting to find the formula necessary to dominate your online marketplace?