Many online marketers believe that more leads result in more conversions, so they concentrate on generating leads and not on anything else. But this doesn’t mean you don’t need to drive conversions — not if you want to keep ahead of the game. After all, every step in the marketing funnel is just as significant as the others.  Each step has it’s place of importance in ultimately generating more sales.

What is CRO?

For leads, there’s search engine optimization (SEO) to get more targeted traffic to your website. For conversions, there’s conversion rate optimization (CRO). After attracting traffic through optimized content, your next priority is to get the most out of that traffic. This is where CRO kicks in.

CRO is the practice of improving your site’s performance, so visitors take the action you want them to do. When you don’t have a carefully planned CRO strategy, people will look around your site for a bit out of curiosity then leave without subscribing to your newsletter, providing their contact details for a free download, or doing anything that will keep you connected to them.

But with a CRO plan in place, your website will be designed to foster engagement from visitors and eventually, turn these leads into conversions.

How do you apply CRO?

Now that you know what CRO is, it’s time to get to the how part. CRO can be implemented in many ways, and here are a few practical examples:

Enhance high-performing post

• If you’ve been creating content for some time, you’ll know that some posts fare better than others in terms of attracting traffic. It’s either they’re ranked higher on search engine result pages or shared more on social media — or even both.

• Next, check their conversion rates. If these are too low for the traffic they get, it means some components aren’t working. Maybe your call to action (CTA) isn’t exciting enough to be engaging. For example, pick which looks better for a high street fashion brand: “Subscribe to our newsletter” or “Never miss a surprise sale again — sign up now!” Chances are, you’ll go for the latter.

• But if your CTA isn’t the problem, the offer associated with a specific post can be the issue. Let’s go along with the high street fashion brand again in the next example. If a blog post is about finding the best swimsuits for different body types but the offer at the end is for a weak 5% off, don’t be surprised if you don’t get a lot of conversions for that page. But if you always align a relevant and meaningful offer with the content, you’ll get better conversion rates.

Promote high-converting posts

• Some posts don’t get a lot of hits, but they still yield a good number of conversions in relation to the traffic they receive. In this case, the pages already work well enough for your purpose, so you should pay attention to promoting them instead.

• You can share them on all your brand’s social media pages, produce guest posts with a link back to them, or offer influencers an exchange deal they can’t resist. There’s nothing like an authority figure or a celebrity for boosting hits of a post.

• You can also go back to basics and check the pages if they’re optimized for search engines. If they happen to be old content dating a few years back, consider updating them to make them fresh and relevant once again.

With SEO at the start and CRO at the end, your whole marketing process will improve.

Need a strategy consult and setup of your funnel?  Contact us to discuss the options.