A website should be the solid foundation of your digital marketing efforts. With that foundation, you should be turning website traffic into leads that you can track or your website’s conversions. No matter how many social media accounts you have or how often you update them, you hear time and time again from consumer advocates to check out companies’ websites before committing. Your website should be a place where your visitors come to and feel comfortable and want to connect with you. There are some things you can do to your website to help convert that traffic into leads. Let’s look at three of them.
Staying on Message
First, tell readers in no more than 10 words, “What we do.” Below, quickly and concisely define, “How we do it.” After that, make sure all your website copy supports this statement in one way or another. To make my point clear: can we design your postcard, yes. Will you find that on our homepage, or 90% of our copy (website’s text), no. Why, because just because we can does not mean that is the focus of our business. The focus of our business is to help your business grow using your website and digital marketing as a means to that growth. We want to stay on the message that is the focal point of what we do.
Make the Most Important Things Easy to Find
What we call at Hughbanks Design your money pages, things like your contact page, your product or service pages, or any other pages of primary importance in generating income (or leads) for your business, need to be super easy to find. This is where things like navigation and call to action buttons come into play. If you have a service page buried deep within the third tier of your top navigation, and no other way to it, it’s a pretty safe bet that you will have very little viability to that page.
Design Matters
A website that is just “nice” won’t really cut it when it comes to converting visitors to leads and sales. Not only does your copy have to stay on message, but your website’s design matters as well. You need to build a “What we do” message with images, videos, and context, and to visually communicate consistency and reliability. Yet your design needs to go further, in what has been coined as conversion-focused design. Always keep in mind you are trying to get your visitor to a specific goal (or goals) on your website. Those goals depend on what you are trying to achieve with your website. Some examples could be
- Getting visitors to sign up to your email list (blogs, businesses, etc.)
- Luring visitors to sign up for a free trial (SAAS – online tools, memberships, etc.)
- Free Consolations or Evaluations
By using call to action text and design (forms, buttons, headlines, extra) you can give your site the push it needs to convert visitors to leads and sales.
The biggest thing to remember, the “rope” that ties all this together, is remembering that your website needs a goal. That goal needs to be more than just “tell the world about us.” Once you have that goal established, the rest of this will be much easier to follow.