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.
