1. Reorganise your sitemap, simplifying the structure of your website.
Does the structure of your website respond to the navigation needs of your users? Sometimes, we find technologies that use terms and concepts to classify their pages that do not respond to their users’ searches. Your innovative approach or your technological solutions may be useful for your customers; however, without proper education, the terms you use to organise the navigation of your site can disorientate users, rather than help them find solutions to their needs. And in these cases, not only abandonment may be frequent, but also the lack of conversion on these pages.
On other occasions, we may find sitemaps complex and unorganised. The use of keywords for positioning by products or services is necessary, as long as the internal organisation of the website is coherent with the logical navigation of potential customers. Therefore, when creating a sitemap that allows easy navigation and boosts conversions, your company needs to simplify its structure, avoiding the abuse of multiple levels of navigation. That is to say, the user must know at all times where he/she is in the navigation and, for this reason, you must always take into account the buying cycle (buyer’s journey) of your consumers.
To improve conversions it is essential to know your users and the search terms they use to reach your products or services. The idea is that the traffic that reaches your website is as qualified as possible. Because you are not interested in attracting just any internet user, but those who are most likely to buy what you offer, that is, your potential buyers (buyer personas). Your ideal consumers will have certain concerns and will carry out specific searches until they reach the pages of your website, normally the last to browse according to how far along they are in their buying cycle. Therefore, you must organise the pages, make your sitemap, not only taking into account the relevant search keywords, but also the ease of navigation and the structure of the content.
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2. Follow a clustering strategy when creating content
In addition, when creating content for your pages, both to attract and convert to a higher volume of traffic, you should consider organising it into ‘Clusters’ or Topics. The Clusters strategy consists of the development of pillar pages that support a main theme of the business, and that is relevant to your consumers. Then, around this pillar page, a network of topics is built, which are the pages, publications or landings that nurture and strengthen it.
Think of it this way: which should be your highest converting pages, with the highest authority in search results? This or these pages, let’s say they are related to the different technological solutions offered by your company, should be the pillars of your website. When organising the structure of your website (your sitemap), not only must you take into account the hierarchy of content, but also the relevance of the pages you create.
Pillar pages can have the necessary conversion tools, after all, they should be the central pages of your sitemap, the solutions. On the other hand, topics should respond to the initial phases of the buying cycle of your potential customers. Your goal is to educate and solve doubts with these specific pages or publications and link them together in a coherent way.
If we were to think in an analogy, the trunk of the tree would constitute your backbone page, the branches would form part of the structure of pages and publications that naturally oxygenate and make the growth of the structure possible, and the roots would be those downloadables, webinars and other content offers managed in different formats that could be the trigger for the conversion of your customers.
3. Take into account different formats of relevant content.
As mentioned above, in order to convert, it is necessary to take into account different Content Themes or Clusters, but these must be supported by different content formats and developed in different conversion channels.
3.1. On the website, the main channel of your business…
Although text is fundamental, depending on the complexity of your products or services, you may need to consider including videos, diagrams, infographics or success stories that illustrate your solution in a simpler way. Visual elements such as these can help consumers to decide at the time of purchase, as the website usually contemplates the content consumed by prospects in the last phase of their buying cycle.
3.2. On the blog, your channel for attraction and education…
It is essential to focus on solving the doubts, concerns and needs of potential customers. It is important to create quality content that can provide value, that can educate, and yes, that can be reused in other formats besides text and in other channels. Think that in your blog, articles can contain direct forms or call-to-action banners that involve getting to know your potential customers. They can also initiate the conversion of unknown users to known leads.
3.3. In the landings, your conversion pages par excellence…
It is necessary to offer attractive content formats, with enough value to trigger a conversion. Think about the relevance of a guide or ebook, a demo, a test, a webinar, etc. that is the first stop on a conversion path that we will see below.
4. Create conversion paths and nurturing the interest of your leads.
The conversion paths should be a must in your online marketing strategy, especially when your goal is to improve the conversion of your leads. Taking into account the Clusters and the content campaigns to be carried out, these routes lead to the downloadable content or the tests offered by the landing pages we have talked about.
The idea is that these “offers” provide value with specific content before the purchase or acquisition of your products or services, that is, that you educate and empower the consumer in the different phases of the purchase cycle (knowledge, consideration and decision), so that it is the consumer who makes the final decision. In return, thanks to the forms you include on these conversion pages, you will be getting contact information, extremely useful data for your business and your content campaigns.
This data, if stored in a CRM, allows you to create segmented lists of leads, to whom you can send emails that can nurture their interest and trust in your brand. Another content format that we have reserved for last is email. The email marketing is still one of the highest conversion channels for a business; however, it must be executed taking into account the needs and preferences of users. Hence the importance of creating conversion paths that help us understand these leads or potential customers.
Depending on the type of downloads, requests, tests and forms completed, we can find out what the next steps of these leads are in their purchase cycle and determine those solutions that best fit their profiles. To do this, the automation of certain actions, especially those related to the sending of lead nurturing emails can help marketing departments (and also sales) to know if these leads are ready to make a purchase.
5. Automate marketing and sales actions and keep track of them
To help your leads move through the buying cycle it is essential to automate certain actions, especially if your marketing and sales departments are collaborative. The idea is that Marketing is responsible for qualifying leads with useful content in lead nurturing emails and Sales takes over when the “offers” and information they need are of a more commercial nature such as demos or service consultancies.
Automating and implementing workflows or workflows can help your teams to ideally keep track of your leads and their qualification. The great thing about this process is that it is bi-directional. Automations can indicate that leads that were thought to be qualified are not really qualified, so marketing can work to re-educate them with valuable content.
This feedback between departments is important to improve conversion and return on investment. To this end, platforms such as HubSpot can help technology companies to execute all the necessary actions, as lead generation is an optimisable process as long as tools are used that allow task automation and provide the necessary performance information for each of the marketing elements involved in the process.
