7 Website Marketing Mistakes That Are Costing You Leads And Customers

Wondering why your site visitors are not converting? Here are 7 website marketing mistakes you’re probably making that are costing you leads and customers.

“Why is my website struggling with sales?”

“Why am I not getting any leads through my website?”

“Why is my website not getting enough business?”

“Why is my website not converting?”

“Why are my site visitors not converting?”

These are questions that business owners ask all the time.

They’ve spent a bomb creating an attractive website for their business. Now they want to know why it’s not getting them the flood of traffic, leads or sales they were hoping for.

Once you spend some time understanding their business and their online marketing strategy, it becomes pretty clear why their website is not converting.

So if this is you, this article will help you understand what website promotion mistakes you’re making that are causing you to lose leads and customers.

7 Mistakes That Are Costing You Leads And Customers

Here are 7 website marketing mistakes you’re probably making that are costing you leads and customers.

Mistake #1. Not understanding what your customers want

Have you spent some time understanding who your customers are? Do you know what your customers really want and need?

Do you know the words they use when they refer to products and services similar to yours? Do you know what keywords they’re typing into search engines at different points in the customer journey?

If you don’t know your customer intelligence data, how on Earth will you be able to create content that gets them interested in your products and services?

How will you be able to find the best blog topics that answer their pain points and get them to take action, whether that means calling you or filling in a form on your website?

Mistake #2. Thinking that marketing is a one-time activity

I’ve spoken to business owners who think that just throwing up a website will get loads of business.

Or think they can run a business by spending on marketing for just a few months a year. Unless your business is seasonal, this is not a sustainable way to run it.

Marketing is the fuel that runs your business vehicle. If you stop spending money on website promotion, your business will soon run out of fuel and come to a halt.

Don’t be the blogger who practices the “Pray and Publish” method of marketing. Any blogger worth their salt knows that blogging is 20% content creation and 80% content promotion.

If you’re not always, and I mean always, promoting your website, you won’t be able to build enough momentum to get enough traffic.

Instead, you’ll see your competitors who ARE promoting their websites wave bye-bye as they run past you in the race for leads and customers.

Traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. Without it, your leads and customers will soon dry up and your online business will die an early death.

Mistake #3. Not creating content that converts

Does your content answer the burning questions that your customers are asking in a way they can actually understand? Or is your content so technical and boring that it lulls them to sleep?

Writing content that converts takes skills that not everyone possesses. It’s not about flexing your knowledge muscles and showing off your expertise. Save that for the conferences where you meet your peers and other coaches or consultants.

Your website copy and blog posts need to be written by someone familiar with direct response copywriting, in a conversational tone that hooks your readers and triggers their desire to buy what you’re offering right away.

Instead of talking about features, talk about how your product or service will change their lives. Instead of technical terms and jargon, use terms that your customers actually use in regular conversation.

Besides the usual keyword research tools, one of the best sources for research for blog content ideas is the autosuggest results provided by Google and Bing. This data is a goldmine of insight into the mind of your customer if you know how to use it well.

Surfer SEO’s keyword research tool will help you streamline your content efforts and dominate your niche faster by leveraging the power of machine learning to discover search intent for each topic.

With Surfer’s Keyword Research Tool, you can generate your entire content strategy with dozens of relevant topics and keywords in a matter of minutes. It will help you organize thousands of search terms into groups that you can easily target with one content piece.

Mistake #4. Not offering a lead magnet to website visitors

When visitors come to your website, are they presented with an irresistible offer that compels them to turn over their email in exchange for a freebie or a lead magnet?

If not, then they’ll most likely leave your website without calling you or filling in your (boring) contact form, and you’ve lost the chance to follow up with them, perhaps forever.

If you have no way to capture their email address, you won’t be able to leverage your website traffic and turn it into leads and customers. Website visitors are generally skeptical of whether someone can help them with their problems.

You need to send your site visitors to a landing page or subscription form that captures their email addresses. If you don’t, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table, especially if you’re spending on advertising for traffic generation.

It takes about 7 to 13 “touches” for people to start trusting you to the point that they’re comfortable buying your products and services online.

Once they have subscribed, enter them into an automated follow-up sequence designed to consistently offer valuable content and remind them of the benefits of your products and services.

You can learn the art of email copywriting or writing email copy with the intent of convincing a potential customer, client, or collaborator to take you up on an offer.

In this email marketing course on Copywriting and Growing Your Email List, you’ll learn how to write effective sales copy with copy-and-paste templates, the most popular headlines, subject lines, power words, and more, to sell your products and services.

In this way, you can convert a casual website visitor into a lead, and ultimately into a paying customer.

Mistake #5. Not having a sales funnel in place

Once you capture a lead on your website, do you have a sales funnel in place that will actually convert them into a client?

You need to be able to segment them depending on what sort of content they signed up for and send them messages targeted to their interests.

Whether you sell a low-cost course or a high-ticket workshop, you must send them a series of well-written messages designed to convert them into paying customers.

Your series of follow-up messages must nurture your leads by sending them valuable tips and information to remind them of your expertise, as well as sales content that converts.

Couple that with a low-cost offer (such as an online course) to make your subscribers comfortable about sampling your wares and spending money with you and your marketing budget will pay for itself.

Mistake #6. Not casting a wide enough net

So your digital marketing consultant got you in the top 10 of Google for a few long-tail keywords, but the traffic trickles in so slowly that you might as well not bother having a website at all.

If you really want to have a sales funnel that converts, you need much more traffic than you’re getting now. And that means writing and promoting authoritative content for high-traffic searches.

These visitors may not be as targeted as your long-tail visitors, but using keyword research tools to help you find high-traffic keywords will help you attract a lot more visitors who might opt-in to your list and convert into customers down the line.

So, don’t be afraid to go after high-traffic keywords. If you write great content and build high domain authority (DA) links back to your website, you can definitely improve your search rankings and traffic over time.

Besides search engines are not the only source of traffic out there. Pinterest, YouTube, and social media channels can also send you a lot of traffic if you learn how to leverage them.

You may also want to set aside a budget to acquire paid traffic from a number of sources, including Google and Facebook ads.

Mistake #7. Not being willing to invest in your marketing

If you’re one of those people who want to rely on free and cheap resources for your marketing, good luck getting the results you hope for.

Sure, you can pay to have a student marketer provide marketing help. Or outsource blog writing to a cheap blog content writer.

But, as the saying goes, “If you pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys.”

You’ll end up paying people that have no clue what they’re doing or don’t know which online marketing strategies work and which don’t because they haven’t achieved any measure of success doing it for themselves.

So if you’re not willing to invest in your website marketing, you’ll soon be one of those business owners asking, “Why is my website not converting?”

© 2019 – 2023, Priya Florence Shah. All rights reserved.