The excitement of welcoming new potential customers or clients to your site should get you to thinking. Are you making them yell “wow!” or are you making them scrunch up their face and forcing them to click away and flee to your competition? There are several ways to do either so by taking the time to examine all of them it will allow you to stay on top of a winning strategy and not give your rivals an opportunity to strike.
How to wow them…
- All of your marketing strategies, from SEO to social media to paid ads, will implode if your landing pages are not doing what they need to do. The landing pages for all of your products or services need to smack them right away. They come to you for only two reasons: you can make their life better or you can solve a problem for them. That’s it. Make your landing pages clean, engaging and effective. Get to the point, show them why they made the right decision, have many calls to action and make it easy for them to buy your solutions.
- As has been said just about everywhere, including here, speed is everything. Eliminate anything that slows down your load times. Longer than three seconds and modern day attention spans will likely be gone. It is all about leading them to where you want them to go. Anything that isn’t doing that must go.
- Make sure everything about your site is displaying properly especially with regard to mobile and tablet devices. If it doesn’t, you will come off looking like an amateur and any trust you were hoping to build has been destroyed. The new arrivals want to be reassured that they made the right decision to check you out. Look professional, have plenty of testimonials and make it easy or them to get what they came for. Make navigation easy and lose the logic and reason. No one buys anything using logic or reason. They buy on emotion, on hope.
How to make them flee…
- Avoid ads and popups like the plague. Everyone hates them. They just ruin the flow of a page and a story. Your entire site is an ad, a commercial for you. Don’t distract visitors who have come there thinking you are the one that is going to help them. Don’t piss them off.
- If it doesn’t have immediate value for your new visitor, lose it. They don’t care when your next podcast is. They don’t care that you will be at an upcoming business expo. They don’t want to take some stupid survey or sign up for your email blasts. They want you to solve their problem or make their life better.
- You must become them. You come to you. Are you being helpful to you? Are you going to invest time with you? Would you buy from you or hire you on? Also, nothing worse than advertising or being directed to a landing page that displays a product you no longer carry. Stupid? Happens more often than you think.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
