Many businesses put all their marketing efforts into steering traffic toward their website. While this is a crucial way to build a brand image and boost sales, it’s not everything. It is important to have a conversion strategy as well!

After attracting attention, you must start thinking about how to get visitors to stay and – better yet – sign up with your newsletter or purchase your service. In this instance, a lead becomes a customer.

In online business, this is called a “conversion”. In this article, I will discuss the basics of a conversion strategy, then share with you a 10-step process to creating one for your business.

Table of Contents

What is a conversion strategy?

A conversion strategy is a marketing technique that pushes website visitors toward a particular action. That might mean clicking a button, filling in a form, or purchasing a service. It is done through various strategies, from high-quality content to call-to-actions.

Think of it like you’re taking leads on a journey in which clicking on your website is only the beginning. From there, you must guide them through the process that eventually leads to becoming a paying customer. A conversion strategy ensures that they remain throughout that journey.

Why is an effective conversion strategy so Important?

A conversion strategy is essential because it turns leads into customers, or when they perform a desired action.

Website visitors are nearly meaningless when they do not perform a specific action. However, when they provide their email, fill in a form, or purchase your service, they establish a connection with your brand. Down the line, they may even become a loyal customer.

In the long term, a good conversion strategy leads to increased qualified leads, reduced customer acquisition costs, and overall business growth. It also boosts the customer’s experience, creating a more positive brand image for your business. What business doesn’t want that?

A conversion strategy gives people a personalized experience.

A successful conversion strategy requires a personalized approach to yield results. That is because your particular audience has unique qualities and values, which you must work with to turn those people into customers. When you work with those unique qualities, you can create a conversion strategy that makes your qualified leads feel like it’s their decision to follow through with your desired action.

A personalized conversion strategy is indeed essential, but there are still set steps to follow to ensure your strategy results in increased sales and business growth. If you are ready to take your website to the next level, these ten steps to developing a successful conversion strategy will prove endlessly helpful.

With this in mind, here are the 10-steps for creating a winning conversion strategy for your business:

Step 1: Set Specific Goals

Before anything else, determine what your goals are. Be as specific as possible. While it’s good to know that you are aiming for increased sales, that isn’t specific enough. How many deals do you want to achieve in a month? How many qualified leads do you hope to accrue? Or would you rather build a solid email marketing list?

Setting tangible and realistic goals is the best way to start a successful conversion strategy. You can start taking action when you have clear goals, and it will be easier as you’ll know exactly what you want to achieve.

It is a good idea, too, to put a time limit on these goals. For example, if you want one-hundred people to sign up for your marketing newsletter, how quickly do you want that to happen? You may want it to occur sooner than three years from now, so be specific with the time!

Step 2: Get to Know Your Audience

When it comes to a strong conversion strategy, knowing your audience is everything. By understanding your audience’s needs and goals, you can show them exactly how you can help. You can provide an easy solution that’s too hard to resist. You become the answer to their problems!

Imagine a business manager clicks into your website looking for recruiting software. They have a problem – their recruitment takes too long and yields poor results. They want an easy solution to these issues, something that makes recruiting talent far easier and more streamlined.

With your recruitment software website, you can use conversion strategies to show that you’re the solution. Using high-quality content, testimonials, videos, images, and COAs makes your software solution irresistible to the business manager, which turns them into a paying customer.

That only works when you know your audience and their problems. So, to build a robust conversion strategy, spend plenty of time researching your target market. From there, you can start creating strategies around their expectations and needs.

Related: How to Find Your Unique Value Proposition

Step 3: Create High-quality Content

Every successful website has high-quality content. From titles to sales copy to blogs, every piece of your site’s content tells visitors who you are, how knowledgeable you are in your niche, and whether you’re a trustworthy brand.

To make a good impression and improve the chances of lead conversions, you must write catchy, relevant content that is neither bloated nor scarce. Here are some qualities all your content should have:

• Good Structure

It’s not just about the words (although they are essential); it’s also about how those words are structured on the website page. A long block of text is not appealing; readers likely won’t reach the end of it. Instead, space out your content so that it is visually appealing.

• Readability

Readability means readers fully understand what the written content means. It means effortless, flowing content that says what it needs to say without being overly convoluted or bloated. You should also ensure that there are zero grammatical errors in your content. Even just one noticeable error can do severe damage to your brand image!

• Personalization

This is where understanding your brand’s audience comes in handy. When writing content, make sure it is personalized to your audience. Speak directly to your most qualified leads – the ones who are most likely to make a purchase.

• Relevance

Lastly, your content must be relevant to the page. Whether writing a blog or an ‘about us’ page, make sure each paragraph contributes something meaningful. 

As well as creating great content, you should also update your current content to boost conversation rates. For example, if you have a blog that receives a lot of traffic but doesn’t convert leads, adjust the content to include more links or CTAs.

Step 4: Build an SEO Strategy

SEO drives organic traffic to your website. It’s the start of converting leads into customers, making it an essential part of your conversion strategy. Some critical elements that create an SEO-friendly website include:

• Content
• Keyword research
• Backlinks
• Mobile Optimization
• Product images

Creating an SEO-optimized website means generating more leads to your site, allowing you to turn those leads into customers.

That’s not all, though – SEO also does its part in helping convert those leads. That is because most SEO practices involve creating a user-friendly, high-quality website. With well-placed links, structured content, and fast loading times, your website becomes one for which more people will stick around for.

Step 5: Generate More Leads via Social Media

Social media plays a pivotal role in turning leads into customers. That makes sense when millions of consumers use social media every day – you have a large selection of users to appeal to on each platform.

It is not just the enormous number of people that use social media that makes it worth it, though – it is also about the quality of leads it produces. If a user follows your Instagram or Facebook page, they are already likely to be interested in what you sell. So, when they click through to your website, the chances are higher that they will become a customer.

Leveraging your conversion strategy with a social media presence means understanding each platform and how to reach an audience there. YouTube, for example, will require a different form of content than TikTok or LinkedIn.

While each platform requires differing content types, keeping a consistent voice and brand image is still important. For example, if you’re a copywriting company, you will want to come across as professional, no matter which social media platform you post on.

HubSpot has a great write-up on social media marketing if you are unsure how to get the most out of social media for your business.

Step 6: Add Clarity to Your Strategies

It is not enough to hint to users about what you want them to do. If you want them to fill in a questionnaire or follow a link, tell them to do so in your content! After all, you want to make the process of becoming a customer as easy as possible. There is no point in beating around the bush.

An easy way to add clarity to your conversion strategy is to add CTAs (call-to-actions) within your content. These work in all kinds of content, from advertisements to website copy to blogs.

MADE YOU LOOK! This is an example of a CTA that exists within the blog content. There is another at the end of this article.

While CTAs work well at the end of a piece of content, don’t only include them in the last paragraph. After all, many users don’t reach the end of a blog piece. Instead, thread CTAs naturally throughout your content to allow your site visitors to follow through with the action.

Step 7: Design an Attractive Landing Page

First impressions are everything, especially when it comes to websites. An attractive, user-friendly landing page does a world of good for keeping users around and pushing them toward becoming customers.

Your landing page establishes who you are, so don’t skimp on design. Think about images, videos, links, and written content. If you include calls-to-actions (and you definitely should), ensure there are easy links for users to click on.

Remember – the more appealing your website landing page is, the higher your conversion rate becomes. When designing the page, imagine what you like to experience from a website. The chances are you don’t enjoy endless long paragraphs and slow-loading images!

TIP: Carrd is a great landing page creator for beginners and advanced users alike. Best of all, it’s free!

Step 8: Use Lead Capture Popups

Lead capture popups are website popups specifically designed to generate leads. They can have a range of intentions, from asking users to share contact details to growing an email list.

Unfortunately, it is not as simple as placing a popup on your website and expecting it to gather results. That’s because far too many popups are ill-placed and, frankly, annoying. How often have you been enjoying a website, only to get irritated by endless popups telling you what to do? That’s now how you gain customers.

To avoid that, make your lead capture popups natural and seamless. Give them a strong, striking design finished with persuasive content. If you are struggling with a good popup design, there are plenty of excellent templates on the web.

While a good popup design is essential, one more ingredient makes them a success: the incentive. Incentives such as discounts, free trials, and giveaways help increase the number of leads. After all, people love saving money and receiving freebies!

TIP: OptinMonster is an affordable software solution for pop-ups.

Step 9: Track Conversion Rates

Tracking conversion rates is crucial to your conversion strategy, as it discovers friction points and tells you what you are doing right. With this information, you can create a more effective conversion strategy.

Be sure to look at the number of leads, where they have come from, and how they interacted with your site. The more data you use, the better, as it will help you achieve a more robust strategy that generates even more leads in the future. Plus, by tracking conversion rates over time, you can easily see whether you have reached your goals, or how far you have to go.

Step 10: Nurture Your Leads by Establishing Communication

Your conversion strategy is not complete without following up with your leads. Once your leads provide their information, it’s important to establish communication with them quickly. Remember – a conversion strategy is a journey; it doesn’t end when they perform the first action!

Don’t send a single email and think that the connection is established. Instead, follow up with continuous methods of communication via email, social media, and more. The more you do it, the more your brand will stay in your lead’s minds. In turn, you will create a stronger brand image for your business. Just remember to provide useful content or you will come across as spam.

Wrapping it up…

A successful conversion strategy requires comprehensive planning and research. You must understand your goals, your audience, and your current lead generation success to create a conversion strategy that converts leads into loyal customers.

While every business’s conversion strategy must be personalized to its audience, the above ten steps will help you develop a plan that not only gets website visitors to click on links and provide emails, but also strengthens your brand image.