Types of click

You need all of them now that ‘things’ have changed.

Paid clicks are differently shaped. There are fewer organic clicks. This means leveraging their by connecting with social, email and remarketing clicks. Having them all function in combination is what we need for our marketing flywheel to stand a chance.

And then, handling the lower levels of buyer intent, which is just an earlier stage of interest, makes the second click, the brand click, even more important.

Paid clicks

Throwing up a landing page and choosing your precision clicks. This worked incredibly well for a while. High intent clicks are real. It worked to focus a known quantity into pages that matched.

• Funnels can work, but way less often than before.
• Mini hubs in sites can work, but not as well as before.

When you knew how things worked before, you can see what broke, how, and why we now have to settle for working well.

And often, that won’t be well enough on its own.

Why?

Clicks are now diluted. No longer a known quantity.

The source of clicks, the ad platforms, spread the high-value clicks around.

We see variable intent.

Paid targeting is low definition.

The ability to choose your click, to syphon off massive value, has been watered down.

The job now is to filter the waste out of the muddied clickstream. Which means the real challenge now is to understand the nature of diluted clicks and get them to the right place.

The ambiguous click is the norm.

• You don’t know where in the buyer journey the visitor might be.
• You don’t know which audiences are being served
• Often, with the highest value clicks, you don’t even know what they want, just that they want it now.

Low-proximity clicks need ambient submenus and in-page navigation. Ask qualifying questions, put the answers on a page, and promote relevant resources.

Navigation is now a conversion tool. It always has been. The in-site hub multiplies conversion, as long as you have the right paid clicks in the first place! That’s the focus.

Organic clicks

Topic completion matters, both to attract more relevant interest and to convert it. Variable intent has always been a feature of organic clicks, but it has rarely been handled well, because hardly anyone knows how it actually works.

What we do know is:

Site Hubs are an SEO magnet.

Internal links gain you more ground, especially if you use converting keywords, often to specific audience content.

Using your content in-site tech gets you more free clicks. For no extra effort.

What ‘low intent’ means

The low-intent visitor, now a feature of both paid and organic clicks, is interested but not ready.

There are decisions in the way between ‘where they are’ and what you want to happen.

The real insight is into the decisions they’re making and when to apply levels of your expertise.

Clicks either have intent, or they don’t. The clue is in the topic of interest. Capturing it, and developing it is what an in-site hub is for, to take initial interest, qualify it and serve the visitor.

Buyer Intent Recognition

Reorganise all content, group all market-topic stages of the buyer journey together, and help visitors navigate their buying decisions. There are patterns.

Low intent can be developed.

From there, the buyer journey kicks in as long as the pages stay ‘on topic’. It can be a long road, but the destination is the sales page.

In site sales pages

A sales page is a landing page for a specific type of product, and for people traversing your site.

• If you sell to people too early, they won’t like it.
• Conversely, fail to sell to someone who is very ready, and it is worse. They don’t like it either.

It’s the same person! The difference is in the type of words they use. The content is different.

You want both; they are connected, and in the same head.

Social, email and remarketing clicks

With low intent, we need to cling to the initial interest and follow up.

Personalised messaging means two things

• Their market interest
• Who they are, aspects of identity, and an audience profile

If you can get both in focus, then the conversions rise.

• Search is market-focused, the foundation of intent.
• Social is better at audience and fanning the spark of intent into a flame.

The combination of social, remarketing, and email gives you the advantage over a single-channel approach. Social bakes the search cookie dough.

They compound, it isn’t 3+3, it is 3×3. That’s the flywheel.

Brand clicks

The first click is less likely to convert right away than it used to.

The return click becomes ever more important. The site has to perform twice. People need to get back to where they were.

As far as landing pages go, when there is a dissonance between the experience in the first and second site visits, something feels off. If that makes people stop and think, the momentum gets lost. It is the last thing you want.

What you do want is for people to find what they need, when they need it. Whatever it is, wherever they are in their journey, and whoever they are. The basis of that experience is understanding the wide variety of click types and buyer intent.

It is the whole site, the marketing flywheel philosophy that Conversationware represents.