7 Steps to Web Success
First and foremost it is important to understand that a website is a 'remote selling tool', or more specifically a 'remote buying tool'.
Unlike a traditional sales process, a website is very much self service, you are not there to speak directly to your potential customers, so your website must speak to your customers on your behalf.
Your website must provide the information and stimulus for prospects to make that enquiry / buying decision. These potential customers will come to your website with many doubts in their heads, your website must attack those doubts, they will be harshly questioning your website with things like:- So What!
- Who cares!
- Prove It.
- How can I trust you?
- Why should I believe you?
- Where will you be after I buy?
- Maybe this sounds too good to be true?
- Who else is buying from you?
1. Know Your Business
The first step to building a successful online presence for your business is to fully understand and analyse not only where your business is currently, but where you want it to be. Your website needs to reflect your business effectively. Too often they are just slimmed-down brochures. It is important to understand the answers to the following questions:
- What is your unique selling point?
- Where do you stand in the competitive environment online (may be different to your bricks and mortar competitors)?
- Do your products or services fit into easy to understand categories?
- What problems are you are solving for your customers / clients?
2. Understand How Your Customers Buy
After understanding your business, you then need to understand how your customers buy. You will be selling to a wide range of people all with specific and personal needs and buying processes. Each person will need a different amount of information to make a decision, some will be very logical, whilst others buy more with their emotions. You site needs to appeal to both these types.
3. Decide What Action you Want Your Customers to Take
Without a call to action, most visitors to your site will leave without doing anything, make it clear what it is that you want them to do. That action must also be as trouble free as possible i.e. getting a visitor to fill out a long detailed form is unlikely to get you many enquiries.
4. Getting your Customers to Take Action
To get customers to that buying decision you need to take them through a conversion process, we use conversion architecture to do this. The idea of your customers taking set paths through your website is outdated, what you can do is give visitors options to qualify themselves, are they from a particular vertical market or are they looking for a specific service? By giving your visitors these options, you can deliver the information that they need, that is relevant to what they are looking for. Too many websites deliver-up generic content to their whole market.
"When a customer visits your site, you need to give them what they want, before you get what you want."
5. Get Potential Customers to Visit Your Website
Without targeted traffic visiting your website, you will have a website that is not properly working for your business. We use search engine optimisation, paid advertising and traditional marketing methods to get prospects to visit your website. By taking the information gathered in step 1, you can build a website and marketing campaign to channel relevant targeted visitors to different pages or areas of your website.
Search engines are a great way of putting your business in the shop window, for people who are actively searching for what you offer. Traditional advertising relies heavily on interrupting a users attention when they are watching TV, reading the news etc. Search engines work differently, when a user enters a search term, they are holding up a flag that they are interested in what you have to offer, that is where your targeted online marketing approach starts.
6. Measure your Marketing Success & Improve
The science of getting more enquiries from your site visitors, better conversions, more search engine visits etc is to measure what you are doing and improving upon it. Using analytics properly is the best way to find out what people are looking for, what they are doing on your website and where you can improve your marketing.
This is quite a leap over traditional marketing, where it is legendarily difficult to effectively track and measure the performance of brochures, ads, flyers etc. On the web you can track pretty much anything. Using that information effectively can allow you to make massive leaps in improving your marketing and sales campaigns.
7. Develop Your Existing Customer Base
As anyone in business knows, it costs far more to continually find new customers than it is to work with your existing customer base and do more for them. Internet marketing tools are a great way of keeping your customer base up to date with what you are doing, getting feedback on your products or services and making additional sales.
Many of your customers would probably be happy to take additional services, if only they understood what else it is that you offer and what you can do for them.
Splice Marketing work with businesses of all sizes to implement Integrated e-Marketing solutions that allow businesses to use the internet to promote and grow their businesses. From a simple web site design, to a full marketing system, we always go back to our core fundamentals of understanding your business, your customers and your market, using tools such as conversion architecture and web analytics ensure that you get a solution that is tailored to your business requirements.
For more information on our range of e-marketing services give us a call on 0846 652 2412.
