Something every business has in common is a desire to grow. We wouldn’t be in business if we didn’t have dreams of expanding, growing and improving along the way. However, many businesses fall into a pretty common trap too. Thinking that generating more leads is the magical secret to unbridled growth.
While leads are certainly a key ingredient, it’s far from the whole recipe. Usually, leads are generated through improving your ranking on search engines with SEO, or other forms of marketing such as PPC advertising. Both are extremely important factors in business growth, but it’s only the first step. Here’s why there’s more to it than lead generation.
Conversions are the real key to business growth
So, we’ve established that leads are great. Getting more visitors to your website is encouraging, but what does it mean if you’re not increasing sales? Turning those clicks into sales is what we call ‘conversion’.
Conversions are the metric that really matters, since they’re tied directly to your income. What you don’t want to see is an increase in website traffic, and no increase in sales. This means something’s falling through the cracks. Customers are visiting your website, but they’re leaving before making a purchase.
The key is finding out why they’re leaving. How far do they get into your site before deciding it’s not for them? Data analysis can provide a lot of these answers, then it’s up to you to make adjustments to your website. It might mean putting call-to-actions in a different place. Contact forms positioned differently. In eCommerce, maybe they find your checkout process annoying or there’s not enough payment options.
Whatever the issues are, you need to fix them before you can grow.
The importance of the customer experience
At the end of the day, your business doesn’t exist without customers. Whether you’re a service business or online retail, you need customers to generate income. So, it’s important to make the experience as easy and free-flowing as possible.
This often means personalising the content that customers see. With the right technology behind your website, you can provide different information to different customers. It’s possible to tell whether a customer has visited before, in which case you might show them products similar to those they’ve purchased. If they’ve browsed and not purchased, you might present them with a special offer.
This level of personalisation captures your customer’s interest and encourages them to buy.
The role of social media in business growth
The power of social media can’t be understated. So many people use it daily, and plenty of people spend a lot of time on their various channels. So, the old marketing rule of meeting your customers where they already are rings true. You need to have a strong presence on social media to grow your brand, following and ultimately your business.
We’re not saying that business growth is easy, but with careful planning and proper implementation, it’s not impossible. Of course, these are only the initial steps for business growth. Once you start growing, there’s plenty more to consider, but we’ll touch on that another day!
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