As a security industry professional, you have a website to increase your organization’s credibility, brand recall, and generate business. But an effective website is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. It is more like a living organism where the more you understand how it interacts with the world, the more effectively it can do so.

Most of us can agree that, ultimately, the primary purpose of any website and landing page is conversion.

A website conversion happens when someone completes a predetermined and desired action on your website, like signing up for a newsletter, sharing a blog post to social media, requesting a quote, or clicking to call your business. The percentage of people that complete your desired action is your conversion rate.

On the surface, that seems simplistic. However, many things about your website can contribute to or hinder conversions. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of understanding and measuring what drives, stops, and persuades your website visitors so that you can provide the most optimal experience possible, which in turn drives conversions.

Why does this matter so much? Many identifiable and measurable things happen in the process of converting a customer:

• Specific drivers bring them to your website.
• Identifiable barriers make them leave.
• Effective elements make them dwell.
• Provable hooks persuade them to convert.

It is one thing to know that website visitors are converting or not. CRO helps you dig deep and understand the why beyond the statistics so that you can take action. There are many ways to do this, such as using general analytics tools like Google Analytics and heat mapping tools, among many others. Once you identify elements, you can change them one at a time and A/B test for success.

CRO is absolutely critical to long-term success and beneficial in many ways to the security dealer, integrator, or manufacturer.

For one thing, it is cost-effective. One of the biggest mistakes people make is increasing traffic (via ads or other means) to an unoptimized website. They do not realize that increasing traffic to an unoptimized/low converting website will only result in a low return on their investment. Optimizing your website is a cost-effective way to increase conversions and revenue without having to generate additional traffic.

Converting a customer that is already on your site and interested in security is less costly than other means of gaining and converting customers. And the money saved equals increased revenue you can reinvest into other marketing efforts.

You can also use the data CRO provides to make knowledgeable marketing decisions. For example, if you find customers are responding to a certain service or offer on the website, you can move that knowledge to use in your ads. You can further use CRO to attract and segment your audience. For example, if there is a higher click-through-rate on one ad versus another ad, you have captured the attention of your audience based on that one successful ad.

Lastly, CRO supports one cardinal rule we have found to be true throughout our years of marketing and researching — marketing is constantly changing and we need to change, too. Instead of obsessing over the latest shiny new marketing fad or blindly applying marketing practices and hoping that they will work, CRO will continue to be the winning approach to investing in your business by investing in understanding the customer and improving their experience. Ultimately, CRO helps make your marketing more than successful, it makes it meaningful.

David Morgan and Alex Chavez are co-founders of Security Dealer Marketing, a full-service marketing agency for the security industry, servicing dealers, integrators, manufacturers, and other industry professionals.  Visit Security Dealer Marketing at www.sdmktg.com.