More and more businesses have their own websites, however, just having a website is not the end of the story: the website must attract traffic and in turn, turn that traffic into sales and customers. With everyone vying for website visits, it is not a simple undertaking, but, there are some simple steps you can take as a website owner to increase your traffic and lead conversion rate.
Whether you use your website for branding, marketing or sales, the tenets of marketing are basically the same. By following some simple procedures and being strategic, you can easily appeal to more customers whom you are targeting. So how do you go about marketing your website to specific customers?
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Come up with an online marketing strategy
For your marketing efforts to work, a well-thought out strategy is important. Determine your goals such as what type of customer you are targeting and target outcomes. At this stage, buyer personas will help you understand your target market and which form of marketing will work best e.g. for a younger audience, social media marketing and integration may be best while for older audiences email marketing may be more preferable.
Have a great landing page
People are bombarded with information daily and once a potential customer visits your page, it takes about 20 seconds for them to decide whether to stay or move on. A great landing page ensures your site looks more professional and thus the user will trust it and want to see the content or products/services offered.
An attractive landing page increases the aesthetic appeal of your websites leading to more repeat traffic. A well-thought out and organized landing page gets the potential customers to the areas you want them to visit such as the order form faster and with less navigation.
Content
In the age of templates and CMSes like WordPress, website functionality is no longer the differentiator but rather the content. The website’s content should be related to what your website is about as well as provide users with useful information e.g. if you have a car dealership website, have articles on car maintenance.
In addition to gaining users’ trust, great content helps with search engine results placement (SERP), commonly known as SEO. This enables you to target specific customers based on keywords and gets you ranked higher on search engines. This is extremely important as most new users to your websites that are not referred will be directed to your site by search engines.
Call-to-actions
Call-to-actions on your website and marketing content such as blog posts and newletters emailed to customers are a great way of getting users to carry out the actions you desire them to such as placing an order or signing up. Whenever you can, include CTAs in your content whether in blogs, emails or social media. They should be captivating to ensure users actually respond to them.
Use Analytics
Analytics are important so that you can determine what is working and for which target group. This enables you to focus your resources on what really matters and step up the campaigns that are actually working. It also enables you to determine which marketing efforts to scale down or scrap out completely.
Analytics provide a way to accurately determine ROI for your marketing efforts as opposed to making guesses. They also help discover patterns that may have been overlooked like traffic coming from an unexpected geographic region.
Inbound marketing is more targeted and specific, which leads to better results.