How to Increase Conversion Rates and Improve Brand Recognition through the Website?
We might want to take a personal approach, and we might like clever, catchy marketing, but in the end, one thing matters – the numbers. The conversion rates and growing brand awareness are what define a successful campaign. In this article, we will focus on the marketing value of your website. How to improve brand recognition and increase conversion rates on it? Read on to find out!
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How to improve brand recognition through your website?
Let’s take a look at brand recognition first. Making your potential customers aware of your business and the products or services offered is the first step to a successful sale. Your website plays an important role in the process – it’s your showcase.
Many website-related strategies will help you improve your brand recognition significantly. They might be done both on your webpage and around it.
Supreme, Essential, Overriding – SEO for your website
While SEO usually stands for search engine optimization, the adjectives from the header could also be used to describe it. If you wish to improve your brand recognition and use the website to do it, SEO is a must.
Web design and SEO are the first steps, but you need to constantly improve the latter if you want to achieve success. Writing an SEO-optimized blog is a way to do that. Increasing brand recognition requires exhibiting your business to as many potential clients as possible, and with an SEO-optimized blog, you can attract much more people than just those who wish to make a purchase.
Every search we make in Google, Yandex, Yahoo, or other search engines is made with a particular purpose in mind. Sometimes, we want to gain information, sometimes we want to purchase a particular type of product. But, no matter what we do, we are constantly exposed to various brands – and you want your brand to be the one that is shown to your target customers.
Running an SEO blog allows you to target people looking for information, not for particular products or services, but still belonging to your target group. Unlike creating SEO-optimized subpages, this is a strategy targeted mainly at increasing brand recognition and awareness. It takes time, but it gives your brand the so-needed exposure.
To run this strategy, you need a content plan – a list of topics along with the related keywords that resonate with your target audience. Additionally, you should decide on the length of your texts and the frequency of adding new content. The texts should be from 500 to 1000 words long, depending on the needs of your particular niche, while the amount of new content can vary from just a few to even ten or fifteen articles per month. Remember that it has to be regular – someone following your blog might be disappointed if no new content appears for a longer period.
Start partnerships
While this is not done directly on the website, this strategy can still improve your brand recognition significantly through your webpage. The principle is simple – you find partners, support them, and in exchange you are mentioned by them, with a link directly to your website. Potential customers who spot you on your partner’s portal can click the link, visit your page, and thus learn about your business.
If you want this strategy to work, you need to find partners with high numbers of followers who truly fit your target group. Try approaching influencers, non-profit organizations, or even other businesses (which operate in the same industry, but are not your competitors).
Introduce recommendation programs
How to improve your brand recognition, if there are not enough people seeing your website? It’s difficult. But, you can use both your webpage and your current customers. Create a referral program if possible. This way, your current clients will do the work for you.
An example of that can be Dropbox, which has grown over 3900% between the years 2008 and 2010. If you are running an e-commerce or selling your service on your website, do it this way:
- Create a separate subpage
- Include information about a referral program (for instance, offer discounts if your client refers a person who makes a successful purchase/books your service)
- Promote it through your other channels
- Enjoy the outcomes
Even if a referred person does not make a purchase, they will learn about your brand. So, this strategy is excellent for increasing both sales and brand recognition.
How to increase the conversion rates on your website?
Improving brand recognition is just the first step on the lengthy road to sales. Without it, people will not convert – they won’t know that your business exists – but brand recognition itself isn’t enough. After this initial step, you have to introduce additional strategies, which will encourage consumers to convert. Whether you want your target group to sign up for a newsletter, or to buy a new pair of shoes – there are some ways how you can increase conversion rates. Here are a few tactics:
Analyze your conversion funnels
There is a reason behind each unfulfilled conversion. To improve the conversion rates on your website, you need to analyze the potential bottlenecks and eliminate them. Make use of the data to achieve it.
Customer centricity is the main principle of modern, innovative businesses. You have to understand the pain points and needs of your clients. If someone visits your website but does not convert, it usually means that you did not provide them with a solution to their problem. If they are a member of your target group, this means that something went wrong, and analyzing the data will help you understand what it was and repair it.
Firstly, you should find out where people leave your website. If somebody enters your webpage and leaves it immediately, then you can limit the causes of your website’s design or performance. If it happens on product pages, you may struggle with bad content or a product that does not address the needs of your potential clients.
Secondly, you should analyze who does not convert. If you see a tendency, this means that you target the wrong audience (or create products that don’t resonate with them).
Finally, you should verify where these unsuccessful conversions come from. Different people will visit your website when accessing it from your social media, different from organic searches and different from advertising campaigns. Asses the channels and if you find one that underperforms, get to the core of the issue. Maybe the ads are shown to the wrong target group? Perhaps your Instagram posts are dull? Analyze the data to narrow down the search area, and find the particular issues that haunt your marketing efforts.
Introduce retargeting
You’re running an online advertising campaign that brings numerous new users to your website. You see that some of them add products to their cart but never proceed to actual sales. What can you do about it? Firstly, find out the reason why it happens, secondly proceed to action.
If you had analyzed your conversion channels, and repaired all the issues, yet you still struggle with conversion rates, it means that the visitors to your website still do not have a full purchase intent. Sometimes it just happens – a consumer considers buying a product or a service, but then changes their mind – it is especially true when they are attracted to your website through your ads campaign.
If you want to get them back, it is time to introduce retargeting. Sending “remainders” through the open web will let you grab the attention of these target consumers when they will finally make up their minds. Don’t be too intrusive with this strategy, and pick the right time windows (ask yourself a question: When are such conversions in my industry most frequently made?). Do not introduce it before analyzing your bottlenecks – if the intent is not the issue, this strategy will not be effective.
Improve sales copy
Having introduced SEO, you usually have optimized product descriptions and subpages on your website. They might be good, but when it comes to conversions, even a small change might make a huge difference.
For instance, let’s look at the headlines in your content. According to David Ogilvy (via VWO), five times as many people read the headlines as the rest of the text. If people access the page on which they can convert (for instance: a product, or a block with the newsletter) and they make up their mind, it is sometimes possible to change it only by rewriting the headline. It should be catchy, attract attention, but relate to the topic of the particular subpage.
Apart from the headlines, you should also analyze the style and proofread the text. Gaining trust is difficult, but you can lose it in a blink of an eye, or with a simple mistake in the text. If there are many typos, grammar errors, or unnatural expressions (beware of machine translation if you enter a foreign market), it will create doubts in your users and discourage them from converting.
The takeaway
How to increase conversion rates and improve brand recognition through your website? Apply the SEO best practices, analyze your traffic, start partnerships, and improve your content. There are many other ways to elevate these two features of your business even further – don’t be afraid to combine as many of them as possible.
You might also read: How to Build Brand Image and Attract Customers through the Website?
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