Planning and building a website is crucial to the success of your online marketing strategy. You are spending time and money getting visitors to your site, and that makes it one of the most valuable pieces of digital real estate you own.
Some companies run off and create a pretty website, then are surprised when it doesn’t get them the results they want. The trick is to design a website that aligns all the pieces to:
- Attract prospects
- Convert prospects to leads, and
- Change leads into customers
Let's explore how to do each of these.
1. Attract Prospects
It doesn't make much sense to have a great website if no one sees it. You need to get prospects to your website to learn about your business.
Certain channels, certain approaches, work better than others depending on who you sell to, so first, consider who you want to attract.
A precise prospect profile helps you know your customer. Knowing the most you possibly can about your prospects is key to grabbing their attention on the web and serving them on your website.
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing is one of the first channels people think about for generating traffic. When someone goes to Google and types in a query, both paid and organic results are returned. The non-paid results are often one of the best places to get prospects.
However, page one of Google can be difficult to achieve. For companies that don’t have a lot of visitors right now, it's probably not the best place to start. So what's the next best thing?
Paid Search Advertising
If prospects go to Google and other search engines to look for a solution like the one your company provides, a good alternative may be to use Paid Search Advertising—Google AdWords for example.
But Google changes constantly. They recently announced they are not going to show ads along the right-hand side any more. Ads will only be shown at the top and bottom of the page, so the real estate just got reduced.
Paid ads can help you figure out what types of messages and which types of searches will most likely resonate and connect with actual buyers, so it's a useful tactic.
Display Advertising
You can also connect with potential customers through Display Advertising. Display ads are the ads you see when you visit different websites. Display advertising has been impacted most recently because more people now use ad blockers in their browsers. Still, plenty of sites can help you to get in front of people and remind them of your products.
Display ads are less effective than search because people are not actively looking for the particular solution. They didn’t type something into Google, they just came across an ad, so it's more like a billboard along the side of the road.
Social Website
A great way to connect with people is through Social Websites, primarily Facebook and LinkedIn. Your prospects visit these social watering holes, you just need to find them.
The nice thing about social, from a traffic generation perspective, is social websites know a lot about their users. That makes it easier to precisely target people to get exactly the right visitors to your website. (Here's another reason the Precise Prospect Profile is so essential.)
Social media can be quite noisy, and prospects can sometimes be difficult to find. If you know your product and your customers, and put in a little effort, you will reach exactly the right prospects for your business.
In the next article, we will discuss turning prospects into leads. If you can't wait and want three ways to generate more leads, sign up for a Free Lead Boost Review.
Inbound Team is Georgia's Digital Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow through inbound and digital marketing.
Inbound Marketing Services are available for companies that want more leads and want to accelerate their growth.