I’ve made a mistake and now it’s time to own up to it.

Over the course of the last year, I made it a priority to maximize Bravo Design’s traffic volume and broaden our content marketing pipeline going the route of “accuracy by volume.” I figured that if conversion rates held constant with growing traffic, more visibility would produce more business.

Through 2012, visits more than doubled and so did page views compared to 2011. We ranked on page one for graphic design and web development related keywords locally. But did our conversion rate double as well?

No, it did not.

Why? Because I didn’t engage them effectively. Instead of talking with people, I was talking at them. And unless you’re YouTube or a site that makes its money off of ad impressions, web traffic is a vanity metric that doesn’t correlate to revenue on the backend.

More important than attracting visitors is attracting customers.

For fans of .GIFs, this is what it looks like when you target one-off visitors who won’t follow you over time or do business with you (i.e., the wrong people).

So what should you do?

Focus on the things that matter.

Objectivity

Your people are your greatest asset. A lot of businesses think they know who their customers are and what they want, but few ever take the time to find out for sure.

In 2011, I had broken my leg badly enough to require surgery and was completely dependent on the people around me for probably about a month, and a huge chunk of that responsibility was shouldered by my parents. When I couldn’t get off the couch, my dad would come home from work during his lunch break to cook for me and later on again for dinner in the evening. It was huge, and I’m both grateful and humbled by that love.

But just so you know, my family is Thai. So by default, my dad cooks the spiciest food ever. It’s not spicy where you pound down a glass of milk or water and keep trucking on. It’s debilitating where confusion is followed closely by its friend panic. He doesn’t do this on purpose of course. He just knows what he likes to eat and thinks that everyone else will enjoy it too.

I didn’t, and still don’t, have the heart to tell him that his cooking stresses me out, and I actually don’t think he’s ever asked. But your customers will most definitely let you know if your product offering isn’t up to par. That might come in the form of negative feedback or a pass so take a step back and reassess. Optimization is an ongoing process, and you need to be objective.

The Perfect Customer

In a webinar on Attracting the Right Customers to Your Business, Sonia Simone of Copyblogger encouraged her listeners to, “spend 10 minutes describing [their] very perfect customer. That’s the person who can afford what you sell. They need and want what you sell. They’re ready to buy it.”

That’s obviously a highly specific group, but it’s who you should be targeting.

If you were in the market for a new car, let’s say a Porsche. I would probably be hard pressed to sell you a Dodge Grand Caravan. The same would be true the other way around. And while it pains me to say this, I must. You can’t be all things to all people.

On the upside, really understanding that affords you the opportunity to concentrate on viable prospects.

Apparent Value

Most of your content should be about your customer, specifically the one you’ve spent 10 minutes to describe, and should demonstrate why you should be trusted and why your product is valuable.

Each and every week, I receive an impressive amount of SEO spam from strangers that goes straight to the trash. It would be one thing if they were to say, “We helped XYZ Company in Burbank, California reach the first page by doing yadda, yadda, yadda” or offered a case study, but they never do.

One person who has e-mailed me numerous times simply says, “We can increase rankings of your website in search engines. Please reply back for more details.” No, sketchy guy. I’d prefer if you didn’t carpet bomb our website, and it get de-indexed.

Brian Clark says, “That’s the beauty of social media, blogging, Twitter, Facebook. People will tell you. Sometimes they will tell you with the sound of crickets chirping and you have to say, ‘Well, I screwed up.’ And move on. Don’t give up. Try something else.” Conversely, if it is something your people like, they’re going to let you know by commenting on it or sharing it with their circles.

Moving on

There are more points I could (and maybe should) touch on, but I’ll do that that in the coming weeks. If you’re not following us on Twitter or Google+, make sure to do so. We’ll keep you posted on tips and tutorials as well as the sequel to this part. As an added bonus, I find the best .GIFs.

Albert Einstein once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If you’re unable to successfully engage customers, switch it up and do something different like throw your parents under the bus. Just kidding. But sorry in advance, dad.