Want More Sales? Do You Increase Your Ad Spend or Improve Your Conversion Rate?

Of course you want more sales — why wouldn’t you? The obvious way would be to spend more on your advertising, but is that really the best use of your digital marketing budget?

Increasing Your Ad Spend for More Sales

You can obviously spend more money on advertising to generate more sales but before you do that ...

Are your existing advertising campaigns achieving the ROI you were hoping for? If they are, but you now want to expand your reach, then spending more on them might make sense. If their performance is disappointing, though, then simply spending more could be throwing good money after bad.

Increasing sales doesn’t necessarily mean spending on the advertising itself. There are various strategies for increasing your conversion rate — and some may even cost nothing but your time.

Creating an Effective Landing Page

If you want more sales, improving the conversion rate of your landing pages is a great place to start.

If your ad has attracted or intrigued the reader, they’ll click on the link you’ve provided. It’s vital that they arrive on a landing page specifically targeted at the campaign you’re running, not on a general purpose home page. Anything that distracts the prospect from the message you want to convey could prevent them from converting.

This means design of your landing page must be carefully targeted at one thing only — getting the visitor to follow the call to action. Extra information (reviews, testimonials etc.) may be relevant, but it should be placed lower on the page, where the prospect will only see it if they’re already hooked. This will get you on the path to more sales.

What’s the Outcome?

If you want to convert your prospects, make sure you’re clear about what you want them to do. This is partly because you can’t assess the success of your campaign without it, but it’s also vital everyone visiting your landing page knows what you want them to do.

This may be to buy, but it could be something positioning the prospect within the sales funnel. For instance, you may want them to book for a webinar or an event, or you may simply want them to sign up for your mailing list. Whatever you choose, this should be the only CTA on the page.

Analysis Tools

You can’t know what works and what doesn’t without analyzing your traffic. A number of tools are available, some of them free. Options include:

• Google Analytics — There’s a good reason (besides being free) why this remains popular. It’ll tell you, among other things, who’s visiting your page, where they’ve been directed from and how long they’ve stayed.
• A/B testing — Create two versions of your landing page with one specific difference (e.g. your CTA button) and use your analysis tools to determine which is the more successful. Then repeat multiple times for different variables, to find the perfect combination.
• Usability testing — There are various sources for this, testing your page with people rather than automated systems. There’s usually a cost, typically $1 a user, but you get your page tested by actual people.

Which Is Best for More Sales?

In general, then, it’s better to make sure your campaign is fully optimized before throwing more money at the ads themselves. Of course, if you have the budget, it might make sense to do both. If you want to know more about optimizing your advertising campaign, you’re welcome to get in touch with us.

The Bigger Picture

We have looked at some aspects of improving conversion rates to increase sales, but we can stand back and look at the overall campaign and marketing systems that are in place. Are leads being nurtured? Are we building trust and authority, are we ensuring that the right content is getting to people that are in the various phases of the buying cycle?

If you would like to review your digital marketing strategy with the goal of More Sales use the button below to get in touch.