How many clicks on your website are turning into *dings* in your cash registers? If you don’t know, it’s time to start keeping score.
When contractors, homeowners, and others want to buy building materials, manufacturer websites are often the first stop they make. They’ll search for the products they have in mind and then choose the authorized dealer or reseller closest to them. For the manufacturer, however, there’s often no way to ensure the web visitor will make a purchase in person.
With no way to track offsite sales, manufacturers can’t promote certain dealers and retailers who are performing well and moving a lot of product. That means missed opportunities to influence dealers and ensure your products are more prominently displayed, endorsed, and recommended than those of your competitors.
4 Tactics to Improve Website Foot Traffic
How can you correct the course? By ensuring that your site is a source for real, live, in-store traffic. This means better relationships with dealers, an improved ability to attribute sales, and the opportunity to strengthen sales overall.
Here are 4 great ways to convert online foot traffic into real-life foot traffic for your dealers:
1. Use a Richly-Featured Dealer Locator That Generates Leads
A key digital bridge your web visitors must cross to get to the point of sale is your dealer locator or “Where-to-Buy” page. Simple in concept, it can do more than just list locations.
It can actually generate leads, if you use the right software and tech setup.
With a platform like Bullseye, you can set up pages that not only integrate smoothly with your website’s design, but will also capture lead information. Bullseye generates a pop-up that allows prospects to enter their name, phone number, and other info you might ask for, so that your company and your local dealers can follow up.
Bullseye also integrates smoothly with today’s leading CRM platforms, like HubSpot and Salesforce, in order to keep lead information and all touchpoints organized at a glance.
Over half of marketers cite lead generation as a challenge, but with the right dealer locator software, this doesn’t have to be the case. By combining a lead capture mechanism with key CRM and other integrations, your dealer locator software can quickly facilitate connections between dealers and customers who are ready to buy.
That means fewer obstacles that hinder foot traffic online, and a smoother onramp to sales.
2. Use SEO Blog Posts to Promote Local Dealers
Up to 72% of customers who perform local searches visit a store within 5 miles of them. That means one of the staples of online marketing, SEO content, is another great tool for increasing foot traffic. Website and content optimization around local searches will organically bring more people into nearby dealers, looking to purchase your products.
Say your prospects are looking for quartz countertops from your brand, and they’re located in Houston, TX. Naturally, they might go to Google and type in “quartz countertops in Houston TX” or something similar.
Then, they’ll land on a well-written blog post on your site, centered around that keyphrase. By considering searcher intent for building materials and constructing optimized, local content around them, you’ll generate website foot traffic that turns into real leads and sales.
Taking our example, you could write about:
- Local trends in countertop styles
- Dealers local to the Houston area that have promotions on quartz countertops
- Deals on kitchenware and other home goods in and around Houston, TX
If the goal is to generate foot traffic online, personalizing website content to your searchers, using local SEO keywords, and tying in details relevant to your customers’ hometowns should be part of your strategy.
3. Advertise Local In-Store Promotions
Customers always appreciate a good deal. Discounts and special deals give your website visitors a powerful incentive to visit brick-and-mortar dealers. To increase foot traffic, online notifications of coupons that are only redeemable in specific stores work well.
To make this work as well as it can, ensure that you have a thriving relationship with your dealers. If you have multiple product lines, ask your dealers which products are selling the best. Make sure the relevant product lines are fully stocked, in preparation for in-store foot traffic. Website and email promotions will then drive the right customers to select locations.
It’s a win-win-win. Your dealers get more revenue, your customers are delighted with discounts for products they want, and your brand gets exposure above and beyond your competitors.
4. Host Events at Dealer Locations
Since life is starting to resume at a normal pace and many businesses are reopening, people are excited to attend events. This aligns well with the goals of many businesses: 52% of company leaders say that event marketing yields more business than other tactics.
You can work with dealers to host special events such as how-to seminars or less formal, multi-product demos. Mentioning these on your website or email communications will convert the most interested customers into foot traffic, as they show up at local retail stores to take advantage. Combine events with special deals and coupons for even better results.
It’s highly useful to maintain an open dialog with your dealers. Ask them which product lines customers are most enthusiastic about, and then brainstorm possible events around those products. You and your dealers can collect feedback from customers who show up to inform future promising events.
It gets even better with a platform like Bullseye implemented on your site. With its closed-loop reporting and customer relationship data at your fingertips, you’ll be able to coordinate sales strategy with your dealers, funnel foot traffic to the best-performing locations, and leverage event planning for measurable boosts in sales.
Convert Online Into Offline Foot Traffic With Smart Digital Marketing
You might have some sense of how your website traffic translates to sales, but it’s important to track that activity in real time. You can generate foot traffic to your dealers by following the above tips, and ensuring your website is the functional lead-generating machine that it should be.
How can you bring it all together? Use a premium dealer locator software like Bullseye.
Bullseye’s online marketing and lead-generating features will help you see how the real people who visit your website are showing up at dealer cash registers. That means you’ll have a much clearer view of what it takes to boost your bottom line.
To see Bullseye in action and close the gap between online foot traffic and real-world sales, get a personalized assessment of your current dealer locator page today.
