Why a nice website isn’t enough: The importance of a digital strategy to generate sales!
Many customers believe that putting a website online is enough to attract customers. But the reality is quite different. Having a beautiful site is a first step, but without a solid marketing strategy, it’s unlikely you’ll receive the visits and, more importantly, conversions you’re hoping for. Your website won’t sell on its own – you need to make it visible and engage your target audience. Here’s why and how you need to go beyond a simple online presence to really grow your business.
The importance of visibility: Don’t rely on your website alone, you need a digital strategy!
Let’s take a concrete example: you’ve got a nice, well-designed website, with attractive colors and fluid navigation. However, if nobody sees it, how can you expect customers to come knocking at your door? Imagine opening a store on a deserted street, with no signage. No matter how great your products are, if no one passes by, no one will know what you offer.
This comes back to what we observe in our marketing audits. Let’s take the example of a company that had set up a website for their services, but hadn’t integrated digital strategies to attract visitors. By analyzing their AdWords campaign, we found that they weren’t targeting the right keywords correctly, so their ads weren’t reaching their ideal audience. This translates into low visibility and therefore few conversions.
Digital strategies for getting seen
1. Online advertising (Google and Meta Ads) – the key to your success
Take another example: a company offering business office rental services saw a marked increase in requests for quotes after optimizing its AdWords and Facebook campaigns by targeting local businesses in need of office space. When creating a Google Ads campaign, it’s crucial to properly configure key elements such as audience, territory and keywords to maximize effectiveness.
For example, a client installing security products for commercial businesses configured a campaign targeting only two Montreal neighborhoods, which significantly limited traffic volume, especially with an inappropriate bidding strategy (switching from maximizing clicks to maximizing conversions with high CPCs). In addition, keywords were poorly structured, mixing French and English in the same ad group, reducing relevance and increasing costs. It’s also essential to exclude irrelevant keywords and to define the right time slots to reach the right audience at the right time. What’s more, focusing on a specific market segment (such as commercial or residential) rather than targeting all segments simultaneously helps to allocate sufficient budget and improve overall performance.
2. SEO: Improve organic visibility as part of your digital strategy
Improving Domain Authority (DA): Working on domain authority is essential to boosting your site’s credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines. This includes obtaining quality backlinks from reputable sites in your industry. Make sure these links are relevant and organic.
Next, Optimize key pages: Identify the most important pages, such as those describing your main services, and optimize them in terms of content, images, keywords and meta-descriptions. This will not only improve their ranking, but also make these pages more attractive to users.
Next, site speed audit (mobile and desktop): Loading speed is a major ranking factor. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to test your site’s performance on both platforms (mobile and desktop). Slow loading times not only affect the user experience, but are also penalized by Google.
SEO-Friendly content: Create content that responds to the needs and questions of your potential customers. Implement a keyword strategy that includes both generic and long-tail keywords to attract qualified traffic.
Quality backlinks: Invest in strategic partnerships and collaborations to obtain backlinks from sites with high domain authority. The more relevant and reliable your backlinks are, the greater the credibility of your site.
3. Measurement tools: Connecting the right tools
Another fundamental element is implementing the right measurement tools to track the effectiveness of your digital strategies. Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or tools like SEMrush or Moz, give you a clear view of the performance of your site and marketing campaigns. This enables you to adjust your efforts in real time and maximize your return on investment.
Thanks to the integration of measurement tools, we’ve been able to analyze the cost of acquisition and make informed strategic decisions. Recently, at one of our customers’ sites, we observed that the cost was much lower than expected, enabling us to increase our advertising budget. This led to a higher volume of leads and a significant increase in sales.
In addition, we were able to identify certain products that weren’t converting as well as others, and made key adjustments to improve their performance. Rather than working blindly, we prioritized products with higher search volumes that weren’t performing as well, enabling us to maximize our results with less effort.
4. Digital strategy requires a content strategy; communication plan
One of the fundamental pillars of attracting and converting visitors into customers is the creation of quality content. Whether through your blog, your social media posts or your landing pages, it’s essential that your content answers your prospects’ questions, offers solutions and guides them through their buying journey. Well thought-out content helps build a relationship of trust with your audience.
During our audits, we frequently find that many customers are under-utilizing the potential of their blog. By publishing articles on relevant topics, not only are you educating your visitors, but you’re also improving your SEO, increasing your chances of attracting more traffic.
With some tools, it’s even possible to identify the themes you need to address to optimize your blog, improve your search engine positioning, and generate more sales by outperforming the competition. By tracking conversions on your pages, you can assess the relevance of your content, both for your users and for Google.
Continuous evolution: Don’t stop at the first results
It’s crucial to understand that digital marketing is not a one-off process. Once your strategies are in place, you need to monitor, analyze and adapt them regularly. Consumer behaviors evolve, as do the algorithms of search engines and advertising platforms. Global political developments, such as the changes in business practices in the US with the Thrump platform, or the impact of artificial intelligence on consumer preferences, make these adjustments even more important.
It’s essential to adapt your marketing to these developments. For example, artificial intelligence is playing an increasing role in automating sales and marketing processes. By using AI tools, such as chatbots to manage customer requests or predictive analytics tools to better understand purchasing behavior, you can stay ahead of the competition.
The importance of marketing coaching, review your digital strategy
Finally, an aspect often overlooked but essential to the success of your digital strategies is the support of a marketing coach. An outside expert, with years of experience and a global vision, can help you get out of your comfort zone, think differently and identify opportunities you hadn’t considered.
A marketing coach can also guide you to better understand your data, adjust your strategies and avoid costly mistakes. With advice based on years of trial and error, you can not only improve your results, but also save time and money.
Conclusion
Having a website is a great start, but it’s only the beginning of your journey. To turn your visitors into customers, you need to deploy an effective digital strategy, monitor your performance, adapt your actions and keep up with changing consumer behaviors and technologies. And don’t forget: the support of a marketing coach can make all the difference in optimizing your efforts.
Don’t let your website become a beautiful digital backdrop with no impact. Implement a solid marketing strategy, monitor it closely, adjust it according to the data, and keep improving it to achieve concrete results.
