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How to make your website a money-spinning marketing tool
Far too many business owners leave their website design to people who have a wealth of technical skills, but very little genuine marketing expertise. The result is a website that makes little (if any) valid, measurable contribution to business success.
Considering the massive size of the online market — which continues to grow each day — it is more important now than ever to make the most of your web presence.
A good place to start…
First up, you need to decide what it is you want your website to do. Based on this, you can draw up a few, clearly defined marketing objectives.
Some probing questions you need to ask when setting up your site include:
- What do you want visitors to do once they’ve reached your site?
- What types of offers do you want to make?
- Do you want to educate them about your product/service?
- Do you want to sell your products or services directly via your site?
- Or would you prefer your visitors to send you their details so you can set up appointments?
The right call to action.
Whether you are selling directly off the site, or using it as a tool to generate leads, it is important that you trial, test and tinker with the offer (or call to action) to make sure it is as appealing as possible.
Getting this right is a blend of art and science and one of the most powerful things we do for our clients involves testing the effectiveness of various offers. For example, if you are in the financial services industry, you may want to find out which of these offers yields the best results for your business.
- “Are you financially fit? Take our FREE ‘Financial Health Check’ quiz online!”
OR - “Want to know more about managing your money? Call us for a FREE 20 minute consultation.”
Of course, you might get fewer responses from the second option. HOWEVER they are likely to be of a higher quality.
You won’t know which offer works best, until you’ve given it a burl. BUT fortunately, the web gives you the freedom to try out heaps of different approaches with very little hassle and minimal cost.
Four important stages to a successful outcome.
To get the most of your website, we recommend a four-pronged approach.
In overview, it should look something like this.
- Strategic planning – draw up a site map that aligns with your marketing goals.
- Copywriting — this must be persuasive and focussed on making sales.
- Design and artwork — more than just “pretty pictures", good design must SELL your products/services.
- Technical set-up and publication on the net — your site must load quickly and be free from gratuitous technical frills (such as intro-pages), which don’t add value to your prospects.
If you’d like help with any of these steps, give us a call.
We will help you to set clear objectives for your website and identify ways for it to improve your bottom line. Let our marketing and sales experts seek out opportunities to:
- increase sales
- save you time and internal resources
- cut the costs of running your business
- make your service more appealing for your customers
- make it easier to do business with you
- reduce the overall costs of your marketing.
Once we know what is to be accomplished, we'll put our creative team into action to write compelling, motivating copy to hold people on your site for longer. We'll use our design expertise to lift your corporate image, and to make the site easy to use. Most importantly, we'll make sure that it works both for you and for your customers!