Improving Website Conversion 4 – How to stand out from the competition by listening to what customers are saying in social media

This is part 4 of an 8 part series on how to improve the conversion rate of your website using a new testing approach to web design, rather than the old way of guesswork and assumptions

Rarely will new customers buy the first time they visit your website. Instead, they’ll browse to see what’s on offer before checking out the competition.

With this in mind, it’s vital to analyze your competitors so you can find a way of positioning yourself in a way that makes your offer more appealing, beneficial or unique.

Checking out your competitor’s website, downloading their brochure and signing up for their email campaign is a good place to start. That way you can see their online marketing machine in action from the perspective of a customer and see how it compares to yours. In particular, note down the USPs they like to push and where you can differentiate yourself.

But in this hyper-connected social media world we now live in, what customers are saying is becoming more important than what businesses say about themselves. Thankfully there are tools you can use to find out.

Listen, measure and engage with Radian6

Radian6 is a social media analysis tool that enables you to listen and measure mentions of your brand and those of your competitors in blogs, on Twitter, on YouTube and more. If, for example, you’ve launched a new product or marketing campaign it’s now possible to get real time statistics on the number of social mentions and your campaign’s reach. You can also drill down to read individual mentions and respond to Tweets, comments and blog posts.

Responding to people’s comments is great for branding and customer service. But it can also be used to get feedback on your brand or product’s positioning and how it can be improved. Through analyzing the questions, complaints or praise of your customers you can identify how to position your brand in a way that’s most appealing and will improve your website’s conversion rate.

In the next post I’ll be discussing how you can turn your website into a proof magnet by collecting together all your ‘persuasive assets’.