If you own an online business targeted at students, a significant part of your marketing efforts is focused on increasing your website traffic. But traffic doesn’t matter without conversions so your end goal is converting the traffic into sales.
Otherwise your business doesn’t make money. You need to use certain strategies to generate traffic, guide your visitors during their buyer journey on your website, and maintain relationships with students after their visit to convert them into customers.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to drive traffic to your site and how to convert your website visitors into paying customers, like WriteMyPaper is doing it.
Create a sales funnel
Sales funnel is the process that you lead every prospective customer through. The process starts when your leads learn about your brand or your products and ends when your prospects make a purchase and become your customers. A typical sales funnel includes 4 stages such as awareness, interest, decision, and action.
You can build a new sales funnel or optimize the existing one if you follow 5 essential steps which we will discuss further.
- Research your target audience to determine their points, interests, and expectations. Find out what social media network students mostly use and what topics they typically discuss to have a better understanding of their pain points that you can solve with your products or services.
- Create several buyer personas, taking into account where students study and how they make choices about what products to buy. Think about why your customers decide to purchase your products and how they use your products.
- Develop an effective lead generation strategy. Decide how to drive quality traffic to your site and what methods to use to generate more student leads.
- Build a strategy to engage your website’s visitors.
- Convert your prospects into customers.
Now let’s talk about various methods that help increase student conversion rates at different stages of a customer’s journey.
Before prospective customers visit your site
There are different methods that can be used to drive student traffic to your site such as SEO, targeted paid advertising, social media marketing, influencer marketing, guest posting, etc. When planning your paid advertising campaigns targeted at students, you need to convey a clear message to your audience that your products or services can easily help them solve their real-life problems and make their life easier. You can use different channels for advertising, for example, Google Ads and Facebook ads. The choice of channels depends on your business niche and the place where your consumers want to see your presence. You can target different keywords when running your campaigns to determine which of them drive more student traffic to your site.
Related: 30 Places to Find Prospects & Leads for Your Business
Optimize your content for on-page SEO – use relevant long-tail keywords, meta tags, create internal links to new content to increase organic student traffic to your website. Create pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media networks where students are present. Post useful, engaging content on topics that are interesting for student audience, start conversations with your followers that may become your leads if you get them to your website. That’s why you should have a link to your website at every channel and create call-to-action buttons. Engaging with your followers, you actually initiate them into a conversion process.
When student-visitors come to your site
Your next step is to engage with students on your business website. To achieve that goal, you need to take care of creating a professional-looking site, optimized landing pages, useful and engaging content, informative videos, and opt-in forms. Besides, it’s crucial to ensure a simple checkout and payment process. Your website should be simple, visually appealing, and easy-to-navigate. When creating your copy, avoid using complicated words, complex long sentences, and excessive adjectives. Make sure that your site loads quickly and is mobile-friendly because students prefer to search for information on the internet and make purchases on the go, using smartphones.
Update your site with fresh useful content regularly to encourage students to return to your site for new interesting information even if they have already purchased something from you. Segmentation is important as well – you should send your traffic to custom landing pages that offer them personalized information they are looking for. A good idea is to include white papers or case studies that prove the value of your products or services for students. Including videos, you can keep your visitors on your site longer during the decision-making process and increase your chances to convert your student traffic into sales.
Make it easy for your students to complete their purchases – they are busy and don’t want to waste precious time filling lots of unnecessary forms. Provide sign-up and sign-in forms with minimum fields and make sure your visitors can fill them with one click.
After prospects leave your site
After your visitors leave your site, you should take the “didn’t buy” necessary measures to reach them and deliver your brand message. You can use such methods as remarketing and email campaigns. Follow-up emails give you a chance to regularly tell students who have already made a purchase about your new products and turn them into returning customers. Remarketing ads will remind your student-visitors who didn’t buy anything from you about your value proposition and can influence their purchase decision. Just don’t forget to include a clear call-to-action.
These are just some of the ways to drive student traffic to your site and convert it into sales. Using them, you will be able to get more quality student leads and boost your sales.
How technology will help to convert student traffic
In an era where students are brought up on technology and the smartphone has a ubiquitous presence, it’s essential to make mobile an integral part of a digital strategy.
Increasingly students use mobile devices during the discovery stage of seeking out education while the majority make their first visits to websites on their mobile devices, and significant proportions apply using a phone. Statistics show that in 2016 alone, 43% of all worldwide website traffic was generated via mobile devices.
Consider Cutting-Edge Technologies (but for Mobile techs)! DO go the extra mile and consider ways of integrating technology into your marketing strategy to convert students traffic! For example, virtual reality (VR) can be used to create a compelling documentary showing campus life, student interaction, and state-of-the-art infrastructure. This creates an immersive experience and lets prospective students visualize and internalize the entire process.
In order to showcase campus life, Texas A&M University launched a new VR-enabled tour to let students explore the campus at their own pace. Along with a tour, users can orient themselves with an in-window map that shows their location and direction allowing them to use the map to jump to and explore other locations.
