The pandemic has pushed e-commerce to another level. The latest statistics on online retail channel spend and market shares are overwhelming. With e-commerce predicted to grow exponentially in the coming years, it’s a race to generate traffic and reach more people looking for your products and services.
The decade preceding the pandemic saw a relatively slow, gradual shift from offline to online. The much more significant part of retail remained in bricks-and-mortar. Proactively growing online may have jeopardized the existing retailer’s business and relationships.
There’s no debate anymore; brands want to accelerate their efforts online. Even retailers and pet care professionals recognize the importance of being online now.
Digital marketing is vital role in attracting traffic, leads, and sales. Still, you’ll discover that large corporations and smaller companies compete at the same level – historical success, scale, and market position do not automatically transfer online.
Search engine algorithms, like Google’s, focus on generating results based on relevance to the user’s search. If your brand’s content is more relevant than a bigger corporation's, you’ll likely rank higher in the search results.
To explore this scenario, let’s use…
If you’re looking to meet someone to go on a date with, you need to hang out in the sort of places they’ll be, for example, a cafe or sports club.
This applies to your marketing. If your customers are hanging out on Facebook, then go there. You wouldn't waste your time marketing on LinkedIn if you knew your potential customers aren’t there.
The art of finding a date starts with you. You want to make yourself look good to attract them so they are encouraged to come and talk to you.
Similarly, if you haven’t bothered to put any effort into your marketing, your potential audience won’t be interested. If you don’t care enough about the audience to try and attract them to your business, why would they bother paying attention to you?
You’ve thought long and hard about your ideal match, and you’ve decided they’re the kind of person who likes to have a coffee and a chat. Once you’ve showered, you pick out your favorite freshly-washed outfit and style your hair; you take a deep breath and step out the front door.
You walk towards the café and can already hear the buzz of people inside. As you open the door, the bell gently rings, and you step in. The smell of coffee hangs in the air, and as you begin to walk across to the counter, you turn around, and someone catches your eye. They stand behind you in the queue, so you immediately offer to let them go ahead of you. When they politely decline, you offer to buy them a coffee, and you can see a smile forming across their faces. There’s a flicker of interest-A spark. The butterflies in your stomach are having a field day.
Once the coffee is made, you grab both cups to be courteous and suggest sitting at a table by the window, where you can view the park with a river running nearby. Everything is slotting together perfectly as if read from a movie script. For once, your hair behaves as you want it to, and you feel confident, like nothing could go wrong. You’ve got the best look and the best setting; now, all you need is the perfect opening line.
You don’t know this person, so you’ve no idea what to say. Your mind has gone blank. You’d thought about what you would wear and where you would go, but you completely forgot to think about what you were going to say. You’d meant to rehearse a few conversation starters, but you were too swept up with everything else. In a panic to fill the silence, you think the best action plan is to start talking about yourself. You bulldoze them into a corner with a spiel about yourself: your likes, your interests, what you do for a job. Surely that’s interesting to a stranger?
As you keep talking, you can see their eyes glaze over before they start looking around for a way out. Everything had seemed so perfect moments ago, but the spark is rapidly fizzling. Realizing that this tactic isn’t working, you backtrack, and give them a chance to speak. Without understanding this person or their sense of humor, you start telling a joke... that lands badly.
You then try to change the conversation, but you end up talking over each other. The atmosphere is so awkward and palpable that you could cut it with a knife. In your head, you start randomly assuming this person’s interests, without asking them. You make a few assumptions based on their appearance and are met with stony silence.
Each time you try to make the conversation work, you dig yourself deeper into a hole of your own creation. You wish the floor would open up and swallow you whole.
In your business, you painstakingly take the time to create relevant content with your best foot forward. You pour money, time, and effort into gaining new leads and traffic, but when a potential customer shows interest, you’re not sure what to say to them and how to connect with them, so the customer walks away. This happens when the wrong things get told because you don’t know enough about your customers and their interests, concerns, and motivations.
After all the effort, you’re not attracting anywhere near enough traffic, and the conversion rates are through the floor. Your heart sinks, and you’re completely deflated.
So, the next time that connection happens, the conversation needs to be relevant and engaging to the other person; otherwise, they’ll walk away. This requires understanding whom you’re speaking to by uncovering topical subjects and points of interest that can help build rapport.
Listening to someone just talking about themselves is boring, so you need to show interest by asking questions about them. This will lead to a deeper connection by making the other person feel heard and understood, hopefully leading to a second date (or a sale!).
It’s not about which comes first - the chicken or the egg.
They’re interrelated, so you can’t have one without the other: you need to drive traffic (with marketing) and invest in gaining a deeper understanding of your customer (with insights).
If you’re not happy with your conversion rates, it’s probably not because of how you’re drawing traffic but more about the relevancy of your content.
Investing in insights to uncover a deeper understanding of your potential customers, what they think and feel, and their interests and motivations will make good your efforts in driving traffic.
If you’d like to learn more about how we go further, please read our article, "Who's at the center of your Marketing Flywheel?".
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