Seven Website Design Secrets to Get You More Sales
Secret #3 – Get Attention
Read the previous website design secret – Get Found
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 three is to Get Attention – provide something of value to our audience and make sure they see what we are offering.
Begin with a Great Headline
The first thing we need to capture attention, is a compelling headline.
The purpose of the headline on our web page is simply to get the next section read. If we can write a headline interesting and useful enough to hold someone’s attention, we’ve got your foot in the door of a conversion. Now that we’re in the elevator, we have those precious extra seconds to communicate/pitch our idea.
There’s an art to crafting an effective headline, but there are also some techniques and formulas you can lean on to help you get started. These are formulas for the construction of writing, not formulas for success – because there are no formulas for success. Use these constructs to build your headline. They’re not going to work for everything, but they will get you started.
How to [Benefit 1] and [Benefit 2]
How to Save Money and Retire Rich
How to Save Time and Get Things Done
How to Create Stunning Images Faster
Note that these headlines also work without the “How to”
How to [Mundane Task] that [Rewarding Benefit]
How to get a mortgage that cuts your monthly payments in half.
How [Person or Thing] [Benefit beginning with verb]
How Jill improved her memory in just one evening.
How a compelling headline improved my landing page conversions by 500%
The Only Way to [do something desirable] Without [doing something undesirable]
The Only Way to Lose Weight without Starving Yourself
[Do Something Hard] in [Period of Time] or [Promise]
Tune Your Piano in 15 Minutes or “Piano Tuner App” Is Free
[Do Something Desirable] without [Something hard]
Build, Publish and A/B Test Landing Pages Without Complicated Code
Features TELL and Benefits SELL!
Benefits
Once we’ve captured our visitors’ attention with our killer headline, we now need to tell them “What’s in it for them”.
Our headline and obvious value proposition grab our visitors’ attention in less than 5 seconds. They decide to engage further, and we now need a short and obvious list of benefits that really sell them on our desired action.
Consumers are primarily driven by their wants and needs, and listing our technical achievements often fails to connect with them. Would you buy a car because it’s got over 300 horsepower, or because it’s fast, fun, and thrilling to drive? It’s almost certainly the latter.
So we need to focus on listing our product’s (or service’s) benefits on our page. A focus on benefits lets us connect with all customers, while a focus on features only connects with the technically minded.
“Features Tell and Benefits Sell.”
A feature is WHAT our product, service or community has or does. The benefit is WHY the feature is important to the person we are communicating with.
An easy way to determine the benefit of a feature is to ask the question – Why is this important? If you drill down, asking why each time you will find the core benefit of the feature. Note, the benefit may be different depending on who you are talking to, so it is important to do the exercise in context of a specific target audience.
Content
Getting your content shared across the internet will broaden your reach considerably. You’ve probably heard about content that has “gone viral” and the attention, that the publisher of that content receives. With that attention comes authority, credibility and probably increased sales.
So how do you get your content shared? The “secret” is actually quite simple, and it is the same “secret” to being found in the search engines and engaging your audience – give them information they want and need, do it better than anyone else in your field, do it regularly and consistently. And then encourage people to share your content with strong calls to action.
Be An Authority
Now that you are clear on who your target audience and ideal customers are, and what it is that you have to offer them, you need to become the authority or “go to business” for that particular service or product. No matter what industry you’re serving, it should be your goal to become the authority. It takes work up front, but the rewards are worth it.
The secret, is to start with Authority Content – the act of consistently creating and distributing helpful information and stories to gain the attention, engage and influence a clearly defined audience with the objective being to identify those who would benefit from your products / services.
So, there is the “secret” – produce regular, valuable content targeted to your website visitors, to the people who you want to talk to. Not only will your target audience love you for it, they are going to want to share this content! Further the search engines will re-index your site each time they visit, because things have changed again. And, if done correctly and strategically, this content based strategy will rapidly move you up the search rankings, for the search terms you are targeting.
Of course, the problem is that producing content on a regular basis is time consuming and often not perceived as a high value task in the business. Most of the time it gets delegated to someone who doesn’t know how to do it properly. So it is done poorly, infrequently and eventually new content just doesn’t get produced and published at all.
The solution to this problem is to somehow organize to regularly publish – whether to make time for key people in the business to do it, as a vital business process, or to outsource to experts to do it for you. Even if outsourced, it will still require a lot of input (and time) from the business decision makers, regarding having the right tone, the right language, and other aspects unique to each business and target audience.
The key thing is to hit the publish button! Hit it often and regularly!
Your aim should be to create a valuable online resource for your website visitors – good websites are also packed with helpful and inspiring content, in fact, the helpful stuff vs sales information should be in the good old 80:20 ratio.
The main tool for regularly updating your website, is your blog. All too often, I get told “we don’t need the blog, we’re not into that!” – a blog is still perceived as a “personal diary” online by many people. The fact is, a blog is the mechanism whereby you can regularly “feed” your website with new content.
What to Publish
You should have no shortage of information you can publish on a regular, ongoing basis. News and events about your business, your industry and products or services would be the most obvious place to start, but remember that it should all be focused on delivering value to your website visitor. Frequently asked questions is another – how often does your business get called with the same questions over and over, and someone on your staff needs to spend time answering the same questions repeatedly. Those questions should be on your website with clear answers.
Because most people are visual, it is very beneficial to your website visitors to have images and graphics to help explain the topics you are writing about. Even better still, would be video! If the business owner is on video, on the website, explaining the business philosophy, or how the business helps its customers, it will be much more engaging than words on the page.
Of course, if you want to do even more, then webinars, podcasts, membership sites, premium forums (or is that forii?), live streaming can also be considered. The technical requirements of these publishing media, generally do mean that you’ll need some specific expertise to set them up and keep them working.
In summary then, the third of our Seven Website Design Secrets, is to Get Attention – provide something of value to our audience and make sure they see what we are offering.
In the next post of the Seven Website Design Secrets to Get You More Sales series, we’ll cover the topic of Getting Leads. 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.