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Making the most of your online marketing budget

VERY often, online marketing involves paying for people to visit your website by clicking links in other places on the internet, and this means that on your website is where the greatest opportunity for making the most of your online marketing budget exists.

It’s no good spending a lot of money at those other places to get people onto your website if your website doesn’t work as hard as it possibly can to make those visitors do what you want them to do, for example filling in a form or picking up a phone to call you. The process of getting more of your website visitors to take the action you want is known as conversion rate optimisation – it might equally be called “making the most of your marketing spend’.

If 1,000 visitors come to your website and 10 of them do what you wanted them to do, giving a conversion rate of 10/1000 or one per cent, conversion rate optimisation would attempt to turn that 10 into 11, or 15, or 50.

It’s still the case that most visits wouldn’t result in the action that you wanted and there are good reasons for this, but the difference between 10 and 15 can be amazing. 10 may mean that you can afford to spend £1 per click on Google ads, which puts you in position seven, meaning that achieving 1,000 visitors takes three months. 15 may mean that you can afford to spend £1.50 per click, putting you in position two in Google’s ads, meaning that achieving 1,000 visitors takes two weeks. In the first example, you’re achieving around three new business per month; in the second, it’s around 30.

This example shows that small increases in conversion rate can lead to very large increases in the effectiveness of your online marketing. Before spending large sums getting visitors to your website, it’s well worth giving the website a working over to improve conversion rates.

To get started, look at simple things like “Is my phone number clearly visible?’ and “Is it obvious what to do once somebody’s finished reading this page?’

Find out more about SilverDisc by calling 01536 316100 or visit www.silverdisc.co.uk

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