The #1 Reason Your Website and Content Aren’t Converting.

You’ll find thousands of results if you search for “reasons my website and content aren’t converting” on Google. Some will say: “if your content team tweaks the website copy just so, you might get a 0.12% increase.” Others will promise: “add another case study, and you might just get a few extra calls!”

All of these will be tactics.

And once the novelty has worn off, you’ll still face the same old problem: there is something deeply wrong. Something that a band-aid conversion tactic can’t fix.

You can’t make do with a band-aid if you want to grow your conversions. You need surgery that takes the stack of your CMS, conversion, and analytics apps and turns them into a conversion ecosystem.

Today, we won’t tell you to create a lead magnet or add exit-intent pop-ups. Instead, we’ll discuss the core reasons why your website isn’t converting - and how you can fix the foundations for long-term growth.

1. Traditional Websites Aren’t Made to Increase Conversions

Your content and marketing teams aren’t to blame for diminishing conversions. Neither are your devs. It’s not you; it’s the way websites have been built.

Your Stack Is Too Convoluted and You Are Losing Data

Remember the great mid-2000s legacy system turmoil? Companies spent millions to retrofit old technology for new era functionality.

Back then, we couldn’t have dreamt of the big data analysis we do today, particularly in marketing. We need to be able to attribute revenue to specific channels.

So, what’s a marketer to do? You take the existing website your company implemented at some point and beg plugins off of the dev team. Band-aid after band-aid, your website stack bloats until your team can’t make a change without crashing the website.

We need a legacy overhaul. Again.

Different Apps and Loose Integrations

A modern website needs 7 key functionalities:

• Analytics
• Security
• Development & design
• Search engine optimisation
• Conversion rate optimisation
• Content management system
• Personalised content experiences

Currently, we make this happen by integrating different apps, which is why you see different data depending on the source, and your team can’t change anything without broken porcelain.

At a certain point, the stack gets too big for the functionality you need to increase conversions, namely:

2.  You’re Not Converting Because You’re Not Personalising

66% of your customers expect your company to understand their needs and challenges. They demand personalisation.

B2C doesn’t care about your B2B solutions.

Enterprises don’t want to read your SMB case study.

They want to access content tailored to them in one click (or less). Without immediate personalisation, you put the onus on other, weaker links in your conversion chain.

And if you’re only personalising email, you’re missing out.

Personalisation in 2022 Hurts (But It Shouldn’t)

So, why aren’t you personalising as well as you could?

38% of marketers in Econsultancy's survey said they didn’t have a personalisation strategy. The usual suspects were there, with the lack of resources (57%) and budget (32%) leading the race to the CRO bottom.

Only 25% of marketers used website personalisation, 93% of which saw significant conversion increases.

Content ROI is notoriously tricky. It’s even harder to attribute your revenue to marketing personalisation. How do you track it when every app tells a different story, preventing you from measuring how each step in the funnel drives conversions?

Your marketing team may be ambitious, but you’ve seen the looks on their faces when you bring up innovative personalisation strategies. They can’t touch the website on their own. If they engage the tech team, it’ll take time and lead to compromises that defeat your strategy’s point.

Integrated Websites Enable Personalisation

Marketing personalisation requires an integrated tech stack.

If you want your website to identify specific audience segments and personalise your content to them, every cog in your website machine needs to support that goal.

(A WordPress plugin just isn’t going to cut it.)

3. Your Content Isn’t Converting Because of Your Content Management System

To understand why our content isn’t converting, we don’t need to look further than the systems we use to manage it. WordPress may have been revolutionary to bloggers in 2005, but it’s an obstacle to marketers in 2022. Webflow is a sleek, mean machine.

The only problem is that it wasn’t built for ambitious content experiences that increase conversions.

Content Management Systems Don’t Enable Marketing & Editorial Teams

You can manage content with CMS, but it’s hard to create it. If we gave marketing free tech reign, we’d see interactive landing pages, content tailored to each segment according to the funnel stage, and dynamic content where sections magically change to entice diverse audience segments.

There’s nothing like the wrong CMS to stop a good marketing team.

As you scale your efforts, upload more content, and attract more traffic, your website will load slower, categorisation will fall into disrepair, and you’ll need a dedicated CMS role to coordinate collaboration.

Some companies resort to building their own systems, whether a headless CMS or a custom solution. Both are better than stacking more widgets & plugins.

Each widget & plugin comes with a price, but there is an additional cost: maintenance. With frequent updates, back-end limitations, and security risks, it’s much wiser to build the right foundations once than to continue paying for solutions that won’t scale.

Efficient Content Collaboration

A good content conversion OS allows marketing to become the conversation it’s meant to be. Instead of collaborating in Google Docs, your editorial, marketing, creative, and dev teams can collaborate within the system to personalise at scale.

And when you decide to take it a step further, your conversion system won’t stand in your way.

4. Does Your Design Encourage Conversions?

A typical company launches with the starter website. As it grows, the website grows (or doesn’t) with it. After all, whose design strategy is the same today as it was on launch day?

The problem is, your website needs to support your growth and your audience’s evolution. Back in the mid-2000s, your prospects visited your website to find your phone number. Today, they visit your website to learn, get convinced, and convert.

Your design needs to keep up.

The Website Redesign Headaches

It’s a gut reaction: when a marketing team hears the words “website redesign,” they get a migraine. You can’t make decisions for years to come. You can’t afford to stay offline and send fewer MQLs to the sales team.

But you need to keep up with the times.

Websites of the future are built for continuous improvement. Get insights from your customers and apply them to your design quickly and painlessly. Implement new personalisation strategies without needing to change the very foundation of your site.

Adaptable Design

Consumer sentiment will keep changing, and big and mid-market companies could lose the game.

To look at the future, we need only look at small businesses. A small business doesn’t need a cross-departmental initiative to implement a minor design change. They learn, change, and grow quickly.

But as you scale, implementing changes gets harder without a system built to increase conversions continuously.

How a Conversion OS Helps

Your conversion rate doesn’t need another gimmick. It requires a conversion ecosystem that understands:

• Your design strategy
• Your marketing goals
• Your development abilities

You need a central coordination system that brings every aspect together to help you grow.

In short: you need conversions, and a conversion OS can help.

Coordinate and Create in One Place

We love Figma and Google Docs, but it’s hard to translate what your team creates to what your website can do.

Conversion OS centralises your efforts. It brings your marketing, editorial, design, and dev teams together. In some solutions like Mawla’s Conversion OS, your devs won’t even have to start from scratch.

You’ll get 70% of the functionality to get started. The rest is up to you to customise with powerful back-end functionality (no plugins or widgets needed). Once the devs are done, your marketing team can make changes, building out personalised funnels for as many segments as needed.

Integrated Conversion Stack

Your CMS, your CRM, and your analytics tools are just that: tools. There are leaks and faults even when you integrate them.

A conversion OS is built to measure every data point demonstrating your content personalisation and marketing ROI, so you spend your budget on the right initiatives.

Intuitive Personalisation & Content Experiences

You need more than a glued-together personalisation approach. You need a system that changes to entice every website visitor.

A full-scale conversion ecosystem allows your marketing team to implement personalisation strategies directly on your website (without worrying about breaking functionality).

Scale without the Growing Pains

Finally, companies are increasingly investing in conversion ecosystems because content works, and they want to double-down on a profitable channel.

Your content isn’t here to only attract attention from search engines. Content experiences unlock new opportunities from your existing customer base when appropriately implemented.

Should You Get a Long-Term Conversion Solution?

75% of consumers agree: they want to buy from brands that offer personalised digital experiences. And as marketers, we want to provide personalised experiences that increase our revenue by 20%.

With a traditional website, the road is full of obstacles, from implementing dynamic content experiences to demonstrating ROI. The existing website solutions aren’t ready to focus on conversions.

They’d rather stay static.

Is the time right to switch to a conversion OS?

First, list your existing problems. Assemble your team to identify the core causes behind low conversion rates. Why aren’t you launching ambitious campaigns? What are your personalisation bottlenecks?

Then, map your problems to costs. How much revenue are you losing? Is your productivity suffering as a result of cross-team data silos? How much does your existing stack (all plugins included) cost?

Finally, explore alternative solutions. If your company is website-first, generating the majority of your revenue through your website, explore headless CMS or conversion OS solutions.

The band-aid has to come off at some point.

And the sooner it comes off, the faster you’ll get conversions.

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Interested in learning more about custom conversion OS solutions for your company? Discover how a next-generation marketing website solves your challenges. Book a Mawla demo.