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Does your website sign post the visitors’ journey properly?
If not you’ll lose them along the way.
Having clarity on these will help you instinctively:-
- Identify the correct content
- Know where to include the content
- Determine what is summary information and what is detail information and why you need both
- Determine if you need various professionals to bring their skills to bear to polish your presentations
- Determine how you market your website
- Determine what metrics you use to prove a good ROI or where you need to make changes
Include the correct content
This whole process starts with Key #1 in mind, and that’s knowing your customer avatar. For those who missed it it’s in the first PDF of the series of “Keys to High Converting Websites” available free here >>>>
Once you know your customer in great detail you will understand their needs, and importantly what emotive subjects will trigger their brain response to engage with you. You need to appeal to some fundamental need:
- You are taking “pain” away from them.
- You are helping them succeed in business or relationships.
- You are helping them get something they need.
So what's the correct content?
You show them exactly what they want to achieve, you show them you understand their want with empathy, you show them examples of how you do it for others, especially others they respect, you show them proof from others that they made the right choice to use you and your products and services.
That outlines the right content, now what are the details?
Rule One
Anything and everything you produce must be consistent. This is the reason why all businesses should have a brand manual that defines the range of everything that meets and greets the outside world. Many people think that branding as just the Visual Identity or the business logo. It’s much more than this; your brand is everything that defines you and ensures a clear and consistent message to the outside world. Branding and Visual identity are covered in future Keys.
Rule Two
Anything and everything you produce must be in line with the Vision you have for your business and the website will be just one mechanism you have chosen to put in place as part of the Mission you are on to achieve your Vision. We’ll cover Vision and Mission statements in later Keys and , whilst it may seem off topic, without clarity here you will not be laser focussed on exactly the right course.
Believe me, getting the above clear in your mind before even considering the website will ultimately give you a presence online that will have an awesome effect on your fortunes.
Now you can see that JUST having a stunning looking website is but a small part of getting it right.
With those two rules in place we can then make a good dive into the marketing tool box and pull out the items that will work best for your website.
Toolkit of tactics
These are some of the many tactics, the nuts and bolts in the tool kit that can be deployed to build your website journey:
- Copy
- Titling
- Captive graphics
- Mouse overs
- Imagery
- Photography
- Creative design that works across all devices
- Testimonials
- Written
- Video
- Interview
- Video
- Client testimonials shot on phones
- Professional structured scripted videos
- Corporate presentations
- “How to” videos
- Calls to action
- Forms
- Autoresponders
- Blogs
- Competitions
- Special offers
- Referral mechanisms
- Affiliate schemes
- Personalised pages
- Email series
- Scorecards
- Surveys
- Accessibility facilities
- Chat
- Chatbots
- Search
- Categorisation
- Meta tagging
With more time we could extend these tools wider and deeper, but you get the idea that, with the experience of your web development and marketing people, you’ve a positive treasure trove of resources to make you look awesome and the obvious choice for your clients and customers.
The Journey
Referring back to the beginning again:-
- Who are you addressing and what is their reason for visiting your website?
- What is the end point you want to take them to?
With that in mind you can start to take them on the journey.
Everyone will do this in a slightly different way as it is subjective to a degree, however the professionals will know from experience what tactics work well for your industry and online so do listen to them.
The journey you now build into your website must be obvious, engaging, to the professional standard expected by your audience and it must deliver the outcome the visitor expected from the onset.
Customer types
We see different customer types and the different ways in which they instinctively navigate a website. Some will want an immediate outcome and will not want supporting information, whilst others will seek to be educated before they are happy engaging with you at the endpoint. This is why many websites have a comprehensive summary home page covering all key messages with calls to action at strategic points as this meets the need of the “I need a quick outcome guy”.
From those summary points on the home page you should link to more detailed pages for the visitors who need more information. These “detail visitors” will include the search engine bots that are hungry for information so they can tell the world about you, so help them!
We all take in information in different ways and a dip into NLP types will help us grasp how we need to appear to the those with learning preferences in Text , Voice and Audio. Clearly if we send our message by the method that resonates with the visitor it stands a much better chance of being understood and processed, hopefully with the right outcome.
Workshop Notes
- Who is your Customer Avatar?
- What are the outcomes they want from visiting your website?
- Have you defined the end points of the customer journey?
- Have you clearly defined journeys through your website that take them to end points?
- Do you have multiple end points and have them clear in your mind?
- Do you monitor the process by watching how people move through your website – There are tools to do this such as HotJar and Google Analytics?
- If you do monitor, are there dead ends in the journey paths through your website that you need to address to stop losing visitors?
- Do you have more than one customer avatar and therefore need multiple journeys?
This is Key #6 in the series of “Keys to High Converting Websites”
by Simon Thomas of Toucan Internet LLP.
Stand by for other Key topics in future issues aimed at giving you sales, marketing and operational advantages: Social Media Integration, Digital Mindset, Live Chat, Design, Improving Click Through Rates, Security, Business Automation and more.