Your website is more than just a brochure. It is a digital manifestation of your business. It represents not only who you are as a company, but who your customers and prospects are and what they need.
That’s why it’s so important to have a clear plan in place before spending thousands of dollars to drive people to that website. If it doesn’t fully represent all of those groups, you may as well throw that money out a window. Let’s take a look at some of the things that an internet marketing expert pays attention to while crafting the right strategy.
There are three core things you can check on your website to ensure it is ready for a marketing campaign right now.
Does It Speak the Right Language?
Forget your brand for a moment. Your website needs to transcend it and represent something more. This is an automated tool – you don’t have the benefit of a salesperson guiding someone through every click and explaining things not immediately clear on the site.
Your website needs to perfectly capture two things in the way it communicates:
- The target personas and audience you want to be your customers.
- Your marketing message, spoken in a way that is relevant to these personas.
More than anything else, your website needs to clearly communicate what you can do that is different from your competitors to solve your prospects’ key problems.
Forget the bells and whistles, the shiny new coat of paint on your website, or the features you’ve been slaving over for years (however cool they might be). Does your site clearly communicate WHY those things matter specifically to your target audience? If not, this is the first thing to address.
Does Your Website Provide Value to Your Prospects?
Now that you know who your target audience is and what they need, does your website provide them valuable content that specifically addresses their needs and desires? If you’ve pinpointed the key pain points of your target persona, why isn’t every piece of content on your site about resolving that pain?
That doesn’t mean you need to rewrite your entire site, but revising and refining the language to match those needs is incredibly important.
At the same time, the content you create should be desirable enough to require registration. You want contact information so you can follow-up later, build relationships, and nurture new leads. This is where downloadable marketing offers come in. EBooks, video series, newsletters, whitepapers, and checklists – the kind of stuff that your prospect can download, take away and use to resolve their problem further.
Do You Have Recurring, Targeted Traffic Sources?
Finally, you need a way to get people on to your site, and more importantly, to engage with your content.
Getting traffic is easy. In fact, it’s probably the easiest component of any marketing campaign, if only because you can just pay for it. But getting GOOD quality traffic that matches your target persona, driven to the right pages of your site where they will engage with content you’ve curated just for them…that’s much harder.
Fortunately, by identifying who your target audience entails, what they are interested in getting from your website, and how they would most like to engage with that content, you can seek out traffic sources that allow you to drive just that to your site.
Is Your Website Marketing Ready?
Just having a website is not enough. You need a website that communicates who you are to the people you know you want to be your customers. Whether your website’s copy is too generic, or you just aren’t quite sure yet who that ideal audience entails, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate how to build a communications strategy that works.
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