When it comes to building a website or marketing your business, one thing matters the most — sales. A beautiful website or a ton of social media followers are meaningless if they’re not moving the needle.
As Rosser Reeves said many years ago, as quoted in “Ogilvy on Advertising“:
“Now what do you want from me? Fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Do you want glowing things that can be framed by copywriters, or do you want to see the god damn sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?”
That said, I see this mistake happening far too often today, mostly in two main areas: SEO and Email Marketing.
Search Engine Optimization
The first is in the world of search engine optimization. People optimize their sites for terms somewhat related to their business, but which have no real sales intent behind them.
For example, if you’re a pool company you might try to rank for searches like “why are pool liners blue instead of white?” or “what kind of float is most comfortable in a backyard pool?”. You could do well and perhaps get traffic for those terms, but those users are going to read the post and leave. With that kind of search, there is no purchase intent behind it at all.
While that traffic isn’t bad, per se, it’s completely useless. You’re “doing SEO” and getting more traffic to your website, but it’s traffic that will never convert to sales.
Email Marketing
I see the same in email marketing. While growing an email list can be tough, shortcuts aren’t likely to help. Kyler Nixon recently shared a story on LinkedIn of a company that did a huge giveaway to get people on their list, and it netted 6,000 new subscribers. When they reached out to communicate further with them, they got literally no sales. The people that signed up only wanted the giveaway, and had no real interest in their products.
Getting solid traffic via SEO or growing your email list can be painfully slow at times, but the slow speed is what makes it good. If you have an email list of 10 people that actually care about what you offer, that is infinitely better than having 6,000 that signed up solely for a giveaway.
Reach the right people and you’ll reap the rewards.
