These days, marketing is changing rapidly. People’s expectations from brands are different. And technology is evolving at a breathtaking rate.
What worked two years ago may not work anymore. So it’s important to keep a close eye on your marketing. Especially your website.
Is your website generating results?
If not, it’s time to take a step back and objectively review your strategy. A web audit can help you find the holes where people fall out of your conversion funnel… and make it easier to create a plan for patching those holes.
You can do a simple audit yourself in just three steps.
1. Define your purpose
Your first step is to clearly define what you want to achieve with your website.
On a macro level
Your website should be more than an online brochure. What exactly are you hoping people will do when they visit your site:
- Sign up for your newsletter?
- Buy something?
- Read your blog posts?
- Register for a free trial or download?
Ideally, you’ll have one major objective, with one (or maybe two) supporting goals. But you must focus on one. After all, if you try to do everything with your website, you’ll end up doing nothing.
Micro level
Once you know what you want to do with your site overall, you need to look at your individual pages, especially your home page and second-level pages.
- How does each page support your overall objective?
- Does it direct people toward conversion or distract them?
- Do you need more pages to help achieve your overall goal? Or fewer?
In addition, each page should have a specific purpose of its own. It should share a useful piece of information, get people thinking, or answer a specific question.
2. Figure out your visitors’ purpose
When people visit your site, they come with three questions:
- Where am I?
- What can I do here?
- How will it help me [solve my problem, need, desire]?
We talk a lot about knowing our ideal customer, but it goes deeper than that. When your ideal customers arrive at your website for the first time, they may not make the immediate connection that you are the “thing” they’re looking for.
They have a question they’re trying to answer, a problem that needs solving, or they saw a link and were curious.
They honestly don’t care about you. They’re looking for “what’s in it for me.”
So everything on the page needs to help people figure out how your page works, what it offers, and how it can benefit them.
It’s the old marketing mantra: benefits, benefits, benefits.
And to be able to express those benefits, as part of your audit, you need to identify who typically arrives at your website, their state of mind when they arrive, what they want and why.
3. Then merge your objectives with theirs
Successful internet businesses have found the sweet spot where their business objectives intersect with their visitors’ needs and desires.
We do This :: This is what you want
And they know how to communicate it in a way that customers quickly see that point of intersection.
How do you do that?
Get inside your visitors’ heads
It may take time and some experimentation. But you start by understanding your customers and looking at your website from their perspective.
When they first arrive, they want to quickly be able to identify whether you offer the thing they’re looking for.
So you need a value statement to be front and center.
This isn’t a tag line, though a good tag could suffice. It’s a clearly statement of what people get when they do business with you. Here are a few samples I pulled from the Web:
From ConversionXL.com: “Advice that gets you better return on your marketing efforts”
From MailChimp.com: “Easy Email Newsletters”
From AWAIonline.com: “You can make a very good living as a writer.”
Keep the focus on your visitors, not you
Read those value statements again.
Notice how they focus on what customers get from the brand — not what the brand does or how great they are. If visitors are looking for that benefit, they explore more. If they don’t, they leave.
That’s a scary proposition for some brands. But why try to appease people who aren’t a good fit. Figure out who you serve and what message will resonate with them, then boldly state that message on your website.
Craft an offer that fits your objective
Once you know what you’re trying to achieve with your website and what you offer, it’s easy to craft a strong call to action.
The key is to focus on one thing. From the value statement to the information provided to the offer, everything needs to point to this one call to action.
There should be nothing on your pages to distract visitors.
Get all these things right, and you should see improved results. They key is to:
- Provide information that your ideal customers are looking for
- Clearly express the value of exploring your site (and converting)
- Provide a clear path to conversion
- Make an appropriate call to action
So take a step back, look objectively at what you’re doing and why, and be willing to test any ideas that come to mind.
Give it a try. Run through the steps listed above, and let me know how it goes.
