Complexity.  It is something a business needs to grasp in order to thrive.  Many can survive with less but a company that wants to grow has to, with open arms, embrace markets and targets that may be challenging to locate and convert into clients.

There are a lot of moving parts in a successful marketing campaign.  Like the cogs in a watch, some of them can turn and provide a minimum function.  But for the watch to operate at maximum efficiency, all the cogs need to not only turn but work together, perform their individual function and work cohesively.

Targeting your ideal client, getting their attention long enough to inquire further from your search result and getting them to click through to your website is only half of the process.  Getting someone to click through your website is the next challenge and the one area we see a lot of “communication breakdown” (your welcome Led Zeppelin Fans).  

Keep in mind, this is not because you are lacking a message completely, it is just that your message may…well…no longer work.  But how can you tell?

To evaluate how well your home page or landing page communication is resonating with your new users, first take a look at a few Behavior Metrics.  

That is the term used in Google Analytics, I like to refer to them actually as Engagement Metrics, but either way, here is what you should be looking for.  

Bounce Rate, Time of Session and Pages per Visit.  

The first one, Bounce Rate tells you if the user clicked through to your site, read your call to action and either left immediately or proceeded on.  This is the first big indicator as to how well your message is resonating.  

If, for example, your bounce rate is say, north of 70%, that roughly translates to 70% of visits come to your site, see what happening and then promptly leave.

Your message may be worn out IF you are sure you have qualified traffic hitting that page.  Identifying quality traffic is a different topic but for this case, lets assume you do.  

When we see messages that aren’t resonating, high Bounce Rates typically correlate to low times on a page and also low pages per session.

What is considered a good Bounce Rate?  Really strong Bounce Rates are below 30%.  We have clients that achieve this.  They don’t do it overnight and it needs to work in conjunction with the right campaign preparation and research, but it can happen.  

Additionally, it is not uncommon to see brand new campaigns with 70% or even 80% bounce rates.  

So what to do…

There are a few things to avoid which I will address in a second post that help conversions.  With that, I would start with answering the following question in order to narrow down how users may view your message.  

“Is my company message unique unto us, or can I find competitors using the same or variations of the same message”?

I have found that some industries such and heating and cooling companies might as well all share the same brain.  The messaging appears to be very similar on most sites I look at.  

If you have competitors in your market (if you don’t congratulations) and if you are in an industry where your clients your customers “shop around” (which they likely do), your job is to break the pattern of what they see everywhere else.  

This is not exactly easy to do but the companies that master this element of messaging perform much better when it comes to conversions of quality traffic.  Examine what your company is known for.  What the core offerings are and what makes you stand out that is different.  

If you don’t have a unique selling proposition, don’t panic!  You can work on that, but in the meantime, explore language that is different.  Be bold, be creative or be unique.  You are looking to break a pattern with your user.  Test out the new language, measure the new communication in analytics and if it is not satisfactory, refine and measure again.  

Breaking the psyche of the user just long enough to get their attention is a challenging but worthy task.