Seven Website Design Secrets to Get You More Sales
Secret #1 – Get Specific
Most websites don’t work, i.e. don’t contribute sales to your business. In this series of seven blog posts – Seven Website Design Secrets to Get You More Sales, you will learn how to change that and make your website a sales machine for your business.
Each post will contain a video and text for you to read and a downloadable workbook for you to take notes and use to improve your own website.
Website design secrets: Number one is to Get Specific: clarify your website objectives, your target audience, the objectives of every page of your site.
Your website provides you with a very cost effective means of advertising your product or service.
Since setting up and maintaining a website is a significant investment of time – yours and possibly someone else’s (and therefore money!), you will want to know that this investment will give you a payback many times over.
In other words you want a website to deliver an outcome for your business. That outcome might be more sales. More specifically, it might be generating qualified business leads, taking bookings, selling products, selling events and so on.
For any website to be successful, it needs to have a specific purpose and a specific goal. This is the first of our website design secrets. Of course, it’s no longer a secret now!
A website today, is one of the most important marketing tools for your business and done correctly can be highly effective.
Your Business Objectives
The very start of any website project should be to identify why you have or want a website in the first place. Your website should be the core of your marketing, not a separate entity. As such, your website objective needs to be the core of your business objectives.
Here are some useful questions to answer, to start this journey:
- What specific reasons do you have for owning a website?
- What would life look like if you didn’t have a website?
- What % of income is generated from the site?
- What % of leads are generated from the site?
- If improvements were made to your website what increase in these percentages could you expect?
- What does a successful website look like to you?
Website Business Objectives
The next step is to be perfectly clear about the top business objectives of your website. Your website should be part of your overall business objectives and marketing initiatives and integrate tightly with those.
Examples of specific website objectives include:
- Be found on Google
- have a resource to refer to clients where they can see our work
- actively generate leads
- pre-qualify clients
- show we are an authority in our particular niche/segment
- resource to describe the services you offer
Target Audience
We can’t be all things to all people, and neither can your website. We need to work out who we serve the best and then get our website helping them better than any other website.
If you could have 10 new clients today, but they all had to be a clone of one of your existing clients, who would the existing client be? The best way to find that existing client is to identify who is the most profitable, gives you the least amount of grief, is a joy to work with, refers you to new business, pays on time and who you would genuinely like to have more of.
It is therefore important to describe your ideal client. (Some things to consider: involved in what industry/business; title; income bracket; education level; lifestyle; social circle; recreation activities; type of car they drive; etc)
Questions:
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- Who do you do it for?
A good format to follow here is “I specialize in helping [YOUR IDEAL CLIENT] do [WHAT YOU SPECIALIZE IN] so that [THE BENEFIT YOU BRING].”
As an example, consider this which you’ll find (as at time of writing this) on the Innovabiz Home Page: “We partner with [ideal client] innovative business owners to [what we specialize in] transform your online presence into a business generation platform that [benefit] delivers exceptional results”.
Every Page has its Own Objective
Once we have a clear vision of the purpose and goals of our website and who our target audience is, we need to realize that every individual page of the website will have a very specific objective. For example, if the goal of your website is to increase the number of qualified leads for your business, then the specific objective of the home page might be to capture those leads’ contact details and send them to a database; the specific objective of a product landing page might be to sell that product.
Every page on your website can be considered a “landing page” – i.e. a page where the visitor “lands” after being directed there from another place (menu, email, link from another website, social media, online advertising and so on). There are two primary questions visitors ask when they arrive on a web page, and these are un-conscious often – they don’t even realize they are asking them:
The first question someone asks when they land on a website, is “Why am I here?” “Am I in the right place?”, is another way of phrasing that. “Is this where I want to be?”
And the next question our visitors ask is “What do you want me to do?” “How do I complete this and move on?” “What’s the path of least resistance?”
It’s a bit like a slippery slope on a waterfall – if we can capture our visitors’ attention when they first arrive on our landing page and answer ALL the questions they ask in the order they are most likely to ask them, then we’ll have a much greater success rate at encouraging them to take the action that we want them to take.
So, for every page we need to have
- A clear goal
- A well defined target audience or market
- A desired outcome
- The proper structure to deliver the desired outcome
As an example, consider the contact page of your website:
- Goal – to make it easy for our target audience for that particular service, to contact us
- Target Audience – your audience, but might be a subset of that, depending on the subject of the contact form
- Desired Outcome – send us the contact form with their contact details and question
- Proper structure – clear headline, easy to use contact form, alternative contact methods (our details), other specific information about that service for which they are contacting us, incentive to contact us.
In summary then, the first of our Seven Website Design Secrets, is to Get Specific. Be very clear on the goals of your website, how they fit with your business goals, the goals of every page on your site. Also, know who your audience is.
In the next post of the Seven Website Design Secrets to Get You More Sales series, we’ll cover the topic of Getting Found. In the meantime, please take a look at the workbook and find opportunities to improve your website – then take action.
Please leave your questions or feedback in the comments below.