What's the one thing?
What's the one thing your web site stands for?
Most people use their web site as a sort of marketing communications
dumping ground. There are too many ideas, no clear marketing
message, no unique selling proposition and no clear action expected.
To be effective as a marketing tool a web site
should be designed around a single objective and all the components
should support that. i.e. What do you want a prospect or customer
to do as a result of visiting your web site?
You marketing versus me marketing.
Customers are only interested in one thing. "What's
in it for me?" If you don't address this need they are gone.
Many of the sites I reviewed had a landing page
that was all about them. Here's an example:
Welcome to the wide and wonderful world of
Fred’s Furniture (not the real name).
We hope you will have as much fun surfing our
web site as we had creating it. You'll hopefully also find our
site informative, entertaining and for all intents and purposes,
look at it as your own personal brochure/catalogue about Fred's
Furniture.
They didn't address customer concerns or even
show any understanding of the customers issues. If you want
your customers to read and return you have to talk to them about
them and what’s important to them, in their language.
The landing page is not some place to put your
company history, it is a place to discuss the problem you solve
for your customers.
Internet is an information medium.
Many of the sites had fancy flash introductions.
The only problem with flash introductions is that they get in
the way of what you are trying to communicate. They slow down
entry to your site, sometimes even blocking entry to the site.
People are going to your site for information.
You have to give it to them in a way that is meaningful to them
and you have to make it easy.
When your landing page is obscured by flash presentation,
your copy is all about you, your navigation is difficult or
you have no valuable information, you lose the customer. That’s
because the internet is an information medium not an entertainment
medium.
Your goal must be to get the customer to take
some kind of action that advances you toward a sale.
Driving traffic to the site.
If you simply put a site up on the web, its not
going to get much traffic. Visitors find you in three ways:
you send them there, they find you through organic searches
or they find you through pay per click advertising.
It is unlikely that anyone will stumble on your
site simply because its there. There are literally billions
of indexed pages and the quest for traffic by those in the know,
means that those who do nothing to drive traffic to the site,
will see no traffic.
Sending customers to your web site is the easiest
of the three, but yields modest traffic unless you are a big
organization with thousands of customers and prospects.
To drive traffic to your site, you have to optimize
your site for key words that customers use when searching for
your kind of business.
An alternative is to buy pay per click advertising
for the key words your prospects use when searching for businesses
like your.
Capturing names of visitors.
If a customer comes to your site and leaves they
may never come back. They may be lost forever. You don't know
who they are and you can't communicate with them.
It may take several visits before the customer
buys so how do you ensure this happens?
So how do you capture names. One
of the best is to offer them valuable free information in return
for their name. It is seldom enough to simply offer people the
opportunity to sign up for a report or a newsletter. You have
to sell the benefits. You have to make it low risk and you have
to make it attractive.
