Read the following excerpt from my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Marketing Handbook’ and discover how Google Adwords can help increase traffic to your website…
Persuasive content is all about providing a user-friendly, self-service system that allows your visitors to have all their questions answered, their concerns addressed, and their information requirements met. So instead of considering your website to be an online sales tool for your business, a much more powerful way of looking at it, is: Your website is an online buying tool for your customers. Do you see the subtle, but powerful difference? If you consider your website to be an online buying tool for your customers, you need to understand everything you can about their buying process. And once you understand that, you can design your sales process to match it:
What questions will they have in mind when they arrive at your site? What information will they need before they are confident enough to make an enquiry? How will you present yourself and your business so you build the trust and credibility required for a visitor to be comfortable working with you?
To understand the secrets to great web design, you need to know what it isn’t: The secret to great web design is not to aim to create the most visually stunning site in your industry, and believe that your beautiful creation will stun all comers into opening their wallets. So many people get hung up on the graphics, and lose sight of what their website is trying to achieve: that is, leads and sales.
A lot of people come into the web design process talking about what they like and what they don’t like when it comes to web design, and believing that if their site is visually pleasing (according to them) it will set them apart from the competition and be hugely successful. However, while you don’t want a website that you can’t stand to look at, your own personal, visual preferences are not necessarily relevant, and the focus on visual impact usually detracts from what is actually important. Therefore, it’s not about you… it’s about your customer.
If your site makes a high visual impact, but doesn’t quickly and clearly answer your visitor’s questions and help her achieve her goals, the visual impact will not save the day and compel her to enquire. Nope, she’ll be gone – back to the search results where she’ll be looking for another site that addresses her burning questions and helps her find the answers quickly and easily. This is not to say that your site should look shoddy and amateurish. Of course it shouldn’t. It should make a highly professional impression and should faithfully reflect your business’s visual branding. Nor does it mean that the design of your website is unimportant. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact its design is absolutely crucial to its success, but you need to understand that it is not about creating pretty pictures!
To read more, you can purchase my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ by clicking here.
