When Only 1% is Ready, Here's what I Do With the Rest.

I evaluate my best-performing blog posts all the time for what, I’m sure, are obvious reasons.

But what interests me about their degree of popularity, among the wealth of “popularity metrics” one can spend time on, is the percentage of time nothing actually happens.

Not so radical an idea anymore is the study of what literally did not take place as a means of learning more about tomorrow’s buyer. While today, a more fashionable discussion amongst demand generation marketing paradigms, it has been rather proven science, since like forever, that it is in what did not occur that we find future consumers of our stuff.

So yeah, though sexy right now to call it demand generation, campaigns designed to capture future demand, through affinity-building efforts, is a practice as old as dirt.

The Funnel (Condensed)

Now before I explain what I find actionable about the inaction of my blog traffic, let’s first agree to some fundamental vocabulary that I’ll be repeatedly using.

Working from the bottom of the conversion funnel, back to the top, the terms I’ll be discussing are Buying Action, Buying Behavior and lastly, Shopping Behavior.

Buying Action

At the bottom of the funnel is a buying action. these are acts such as completing a purchase or completing the very last conversion step available in a visitor’s journey. So, if your campaign’s journey does not result in a purchase action, then substitute that buying action with one that is in some other way a conversion. A good example of a buying action, that does not involve making a purchase, might be the user submitting a form. In shortest terms, the very last action a visitor can take – of a converting nature – is the buying action.

Note however, that what makes the action a buying one is not that it was merely the last step in your campaign’s journey, but rather an action a visitor took that caused bilateral engagement. A form submission, for example, is therefore a buying action because it presumably causes two-way communication.

Buying Behavior

In the middle of the funnel reside buying behavior. Different than the act of completing a buying action, a buying behavior insinuates buying actions would ensue, but did not.

These behaviors are unilateral and conative in nature, and suggest purchase intent, but stop short of completing a purchase (or conversion). An example of a buying behavior would be visitors moving from an article, to products the article discusses, and from there, adding to, but eventually abandoning a cart. An alternative buying behavior, where a shopping cart is not an option, might be the user arriving at a landing page to which your article refers traffic, but not submitting the form. Buying behaviors connote a purchase may follow, while not resulting in a purchase.

A cautionary note about buying behaviors, however. Just because traffic ended their journey on your form, but did not complete the form, does not suggest they stopped just short of exhibiting intent to buy. Oftentimes, traffic will evaluate the ease with which they can continue to consume information unconditionally. Consequently, the moment they encounter a condition - completing a form, for example - traffic might abandon their session because you asked for something they were unready to provide: their information.

Shopping Behavior

Just inside the “lip,” we’ll call it, of the top of the funnel’s interior lives shopping behavior.

If the top of the funnel is the article that got ‘em hooked for a second, then just beneath that activity is a shopping behavior. Further down the funnel, and like buying behavior, shopping behaviors are conative too, inasmuch as they suggest the article has done enough to push the visitor down the funnel a bit further. Shopping behaviors are those that typically might involve users moving from the article, to sections of the website where one can browse products (and/or solutions). While not as explicit an action as adding products to a cart, or submitting a form, a shopping behavior does suggest the article was relevant enough to cause the visitor to evaluate related products or services. ?

Studying What Didn’t Occur

In studying the popularity of my articles, I chose to look more deeply at a single post specifically because it addresses a critical, time-sensitive need that serves an exceptionally narrow vertical. Compared with articles written for broad appeal, this article speaks to an extraordinarily small audience, and therefore was of particular interest to me as an exercise in better understanding quality over quantity.

As I looked through the post’s analytics, it became instantly clear how few people actually engaged in buying actions. There were so few buying actions observed that, to a lesser considerate marketer, the article could be reasonably characterized as a tactical miss.

This article was anything but a miss, however.

The Data by the Numbers

Top of the Funnel

Working from the top of the funnel down this time around, 77% of visitors to the blog post exhibited shopping behaviors, such as browsing products related to those discussed in the article. In the middle of the funnel, 4.3% of visitors to the piece exhibited buying behaviors, inasmuch this traffic added products to a cart, but abandoned them. At the bottom of the funnel were the 1.4% that took buying actions, or those that involved either submitting a cart or submitting a form - in some cases both.

The balance of the traffic to the article took a wide assortment of anomalous and thus, unrelated paths we’ll leave out of this discussion.

What struck me was the 77%.

Nearly eight in 10 visitors to the article made their last clicks on product pages. And although these journeys ended there, that almost 80% of the article’s traffic exhibited shopping behaviors told me the traffic was qualified to read about the products discussed in the article, but unqualified to buy them.

Interest is Measured on a Spectrum

So, what should we do with the 80% of visitors demonstrating shopping behaviors, but not buying our stuff? That they didn’t buy means what: that we should ignore them and focus on what did convert?

The data overwhelmingly suggests that the blog post demonstrated value to most of the limited market it was written to benefit. So, now that we know the audience enjoyed the content enough to move from it, to products relating to it, we must put in place conditions that foster their interest for as long as they exhibit interest. So, for instance, if the buyer is not ready now, as has been expressed through their inaction to buy, but as much, through their interest in browsing, we must adapt marketing everywhere they assembled to support both the actions they did and did not take.

User Experience

Now that we know 80% of traffic to our article is highly likely to also browse products, we need to make it easier for them to do so. Therefore, consider peppering calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout the body of your article to gently encourage traffic to leave the article and begin browsing sooner and with more ease. Position CTAs in strategic locations where the post’s talking points addresses a given product or product category. Such an empathetic adjustment to the visitor’s experience leaves this traffic free to engage more in the activities they’re going to undertake anyway. This makes their journey more intuitive by reducing potential obstacles to the very shopping behavior we saw so much of in our data.

While the traffic might not send you flowers for the courtesy of the smarter breadcrumb trails you’ve paved, this traffic will reward you with more buyer behavior and buyer action.

Nurturing Campaigns

Key to any modern marketing campaign is how we nurture those that did not complete the ultimate action: buying our stuff. Using tech that informs us of who is doing what on our blog posts, at least on the organizational level, if not an individual one, we can gently encourage people within a given Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to continue to return to what they began. Alternatively, and as lightly, we can nudge them toward spending a few minutes with us discussing their needs, if submitting a form is too invasive for them right now.

Creating a persona (or several) from the behavioral data of the 80%, provides us a blueprint, among many powerful things, of what this particular buyer type is likely to do when consuming our information. That 80% of the time, this buyer exhibited shopping behaviors, tells us that they exhibit a pattern or “way” of doing a thing on our site rather reliably.

So yep! Get out of the way of the way they want to do a thing.

Within their way of consuming our information, we can craft email and landing page campaigns that invites this traffic to download a more expansive version of what “hooked” them to begin with. Maybe an ungated white paper or other kind of detailed report on the topic that the initial article discusses may cause more shopping behaviors to occur amongst this segment.

Cart Abandonment

We also cannot overlook the 4.3% that added products to a cart, but then deserted the cart.

Encouraging that traffic to resume their buying experience with careful reminders that they left items in a cart is not remotely new. But as old and proven a practice as it is, SMBs don’t do it much, if at all.

Easier now than ever it has been, adding functionality to your website that reminds shoppers that they ditched a conversion progression does yield more stuff sold. And even if it does not create more buying, these strategies cause the antecedents that, in turn, cause buying.

If it’s an existing customer, capture their abandonment behaviors and remarket to them. But maybe don't simply remarket the products they were browsing, but rather the topics they were consuming that initially engaged them. Serve messaging – emails, remarketing ads, social ads, whatever – that appeals to their natural interest in the topics that drove them to you at the start. So rather than hit them over the head with product ads and messaging that our data tells us they’re not ready to purchase or act on right now, give away your expertise even more, precisely as you did with the blog post that got them moving.

I mean that. Literally give it away. Over and over and over – just give it to them.

Trust What Your Eyes Are Showing You

Remember, we know this buyer. We understand the 80% now.

We studied what actions they do and do not take. Trust that information. Your buyer is loving your article, but in massive numbers, aren’t ready to buy your stuff.

Trust that data.

So, what’s left to do, once you’ve both analyzed and told the brass what didn’t happen?

Well, certainly we’re not going to acquiesce to what didn’t take place, right?

No.

We’re going to create a smarter, more focused and personalized journey for future demand to traverse.

We’re going to make a faster, more native and temporaneous experience for the 80% to navigate.

We will carefully remind them of why we appealed to them in the first place, and throughout that benevolent set of gestures and giveaways, we are going to persuade more of them to remember our good will until they are ready to move from future demand to today’s demand.?