It’s a pity that the many companies I have talked to say they put up websites without any end in mind. To my mind, this is a great opportunity lost and wasteful squandering of money and effort.
To make the most out of your website, you should aim for a high conversion rate that will provide a return-on-investment for the resources spent in creating and maintaining the site. And achieving a consistently successful conversion figure depends on having a solid foundation.
Start by considering these two important factors: 1) create specific objectives and, 2) know your target market.
Create specific objectives
First of all, write down your specific objectives rather than just keeping them in your mind. Look at your website as an expenditure that must be recovered, just like your other corporate resources. With this in mind, it becomes easy to formulate your main objectives, such as:
- To attract traffic to your site
- To turn that traffic into online sales
- To bring in qualified referrals
Knowing this, look at your website and see if they were built with conversion objectives in mind. The typical company website has 1 to 3% conversion rate of visit to purchase. Does yours belong in this bracket? If not, act now and re-think your overall site plus the reason why you had one in the first place.
Unfortunately, the most common reason companies have for putting up their own website is to maintain its image of being up-to-date with the times and being at par with the competitor. While these are also valid reasons, they ought to be ancillary objectives only, supporting the main one. Here are some support objectives:
- To build your company’s credibility and be considered an expert in the industry
- To project an image of business respectability
In addition, having a website serves other cost-effective purposes:
- It can be a customer-service base for visitors seeking information about the company and its products.
- A community of interested readers can be formed to make up a forum or discussion board.
- It can be used to deliver what were once printed mail materials.
Know your target market
After having set your main and ancillary objectives, your next step is to determine what your target market is. Establish the demographic data of your visitors. This includes age, sex, income, educational attainment, employment status and sometimes race and location.
Take in to account, too, other variable factors such as personality and attitude, interests, lifestyles and values. Having this information at hand will guide you in formulating your sales strategies and advertisements so that they appeal to the right audience and kindle their emotions, steering them to act positively and buy your products.
Having a homogenous target market facilitates your website creation and design. It becomes highly targeted to a specific group, thus conversion is higher and faster.
For a varied or diverse target market, you can take the option of having more than one site with each one catering to a specific group. This entails an initial higher financial outlay but in the long run, it will pay off as conversions can jump from a meager 3% to an astonishing 25% in just a few months.
A total grasp of what your target market is, its composition and buying behaviour will guide you in the development of your products’ sales tactics and in making offers that are hard to resist!
I will discuss the following in part 2 of this article next week:
- Developing site structure for maximum conversion
- Copywriting that brings results
- Turning leads into sales through compelling offers and calls to action
- How to create graphic design to give your site affinity and credibility
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