I found this friend while I was looking for my drive off of the 1st tee yesterday during a Thanksgiving round of golf. Needless to say, I took a penalty stroke. My ball is sitting just ahead of the rear foot of this little guy. I love golfing in Florida in the winter, even if I do have to deal with these guys occasionally!
Long title, short and easy concept. You’ve worked hard to get visitors to your site. You’ve published content, you’ve placed links on the web, you’ve maybe even hired an SEO company to get your site some prime placement in the engines. But, what a lot of site owners DON’T focus on is how to keep those visitors on their sites once they’ve gotten there.
SEO is pointless if your bounce rate is nearing 100% and the average time a visitor spends on your site is a matter of seconds. That’s the equivalent of having a storefront on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles where you get a lot of people opening your door, looking around for a few seconds inside, then turning around and leaving. All you’ve ended up doing is invested a lot of time and money into your store and pay a lot of rent to keep it open but no one comes inside to buy anything. There are some very simple concepts that you absolutely MUST follow in order to convert visitors to your site into bookmarkers, clients, customers, or whatever the goal of your site is.
Research shows you have about 2 seconds from the time a visitor hits your landing page before they decide whether to stay on your site and look around or if they want to click the back button and go to a different site. Here’s some basic tips on what you can do to win the hearts and minds of your visitors during that brief time period:
- Invest in a good site design. No one wants to visit a site in today’s Web 2.0 world that looks like it was taken right off of a generic free template site or designed by a firm that hasn’t escaped from the year 2000. Design concepts change very quickly in today’s web world. Keep up with it, or your competitors will leave you in their dust.
- Update your site frequently with new content. No one wants to see a stale site (including the search engines). If you post news to your site and the last post was 2 months ago, visitors will think the site is abandoned and they’ll leave. If you have an e-commerce store, let your customers know what’s on sale, upcoming sales, new product promotions, etc. If you’ve got a corporate site, let your visitors know what’s happening with your company right now. No news in this case, is probably bad news. If you don’t have anything interesting to say or can’t quite figure out what to post on your site frequently, don’t include dates on your previous additions. You absolutely do NOT want your latest addition/post/etc. to your site to be a date far in the past.
- Use proper grammar and punctuation. Spell check is a beautiful tool. USE IT FREQUENTLY! Misspelled words, incomplete sentences, and other common grammatical problems make a site appear unprofessional and, for lack of a better term, “cheap”. You know what you want to say, but please take the take to double check your work and run your text through a grammar checker. This is probably my number 1 pet peeve when I visit a site. If you can’t take the time to double check your work, you will appear lazy to your customer. And how is a lazy company going to treat its’ clients?
- Provide value to your visitor. This should go without saying, but I think it’s important to mention it anyway. You MUST provide value to your visitor. Do your research before you ever start your site. If you sell products and your cost for the product is $3.00 higher than what a competitor sells that same product for, what value are you bringing to the web community by starting up a store to sell that product? Sure, you may get a few sales from people that don’t do their research - but you should focus on bringing value to the net as a whole. If you offer value, you’ll capture your visitors’ attention right off the bat.
- Clearly outline the benefit your visitor will get from your site. If you run an e-commerce store, let them know why they’re better off doing business with you than your competitors. If you publish news, why is your visitor going to be better off bookmarking your site than your competitor’s site?
- Be honest in your claims. Again, this is something very basic that everyone should already understand but I felt it was necessary to include in this list. If your advertisement promises your visitors a “Black Friday FREE SHIPPING Special!” (I use this analogy because I’m writing this post on Black Friday), make sure that once that visitor makes it to your site that you are re-enforcing your claim that if they shop with you today on Black Friday that they will indeed receive free shipping. If there’s some sort of coupon code that they need to use to get free shipping, make that code readily available. If that’s the catch that brought them to your site to begin with, don’t make it difficult for them to purchase and receive free shipping.
- Make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for. In reality, you should be using specific landing pages based on what the visitor searched for to make sure that they end up on a good page where they are seeing EXACTLY what they searched for, but if that’s impossible then it is imperative that you have clean, easy to use navigation on your site so that they can find their way around your site. Search boxes are good, drop down category lists of products are good, easy to search lists of manufacturers are good. Use your imagination and think to yourself, “If I were a visitor on this site, how would I try to find what I am looking for and where would I look on the page?”.
- Don’t overdo marketing/sales hype. You’ve already gotten them to your site with your marketing and sales techniques, so you don’t need to overdo that once they’re on your site. You don’t want to come across as pushy, and you definitely don’t want to come across as “cheesy”. Be clear and concise on what it is that you are offering in a meaningful, educated fashion.
- Be security conscious. Identity theft is rampant these days, which is unfortunate because there are so many ways to prevent it. You’ve invested in the 128-bit encrypted SSL key for your store, so why not advertise that? Make your visitors feel safe at your site. Do you offer something that requires them to give you their email address? Ensure them that you don’t sell your email lists to other companies (and don’t lie to them if you do!). People are very hesitant to give out their information online, so you need to concentrate on ways to ease their fears and convince them that your company is safe.
- Keep trying to find ways to make your site better. There are numerous free and inexpensive ways available to track analytics on your site. Track your checkout funnel, see where you’re losing visitors, and find ways to better those pages to keep your visitors on your site. There’s no such thing as the perfect site, but as an active, responsible business owner it’s in your best interest to continually find ways to improve your site. Not to mention that as your improve your site, you’re making it better for the web community as a whole.
The Top 3 Principles of Marketing
- KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
- BUILD YOUR NETWORK
- ADVERTISE EFFICIENTLY
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
For any business to be successful, you must know who your audience is and what their specific needs may be prior to beginning your marketing efforts. Narrow down your key audience and focus on those products and/or services that will capture their attention. This is a good head start for any business strategy. Starting out too broad or starting with a niche that is highly competitive are frequent reasons that small businesses fail. Find your niche and exploit it! And furthermore, don’t try to sell your audience something that they are not interested in. You will come across as being a pushy salesman and you will lose credibility and trust with your audience immediately.
BUILD YOUR NETWORK
In order to build your network, begin with current contacts and expand upon those. Network with old friends and colleagues and build relationships through those with others. There are several ways to do this: attend local and national events, host an event yourself, and utilize internet web sites to build your current network such as facebook.com, myspace.com, etc. These sites are usually free to join and very helpful in building a network of contacts.
ADVERTISE EFFICIENTLY
Advertising is a key factor for any business. Without appropriate advertising, you are limiting your business potential. Depending on what type of business you have, you may want to advertise in local or national newspapers and magazines to target all audiences or travel to local areas and pass out flyers, business cards, etc. for more local prospects. Billboards are another option, but can be quite costly. Another, more economical avenue would be the internet to market your business. There are free web sites such as craigslist.org, backpage.com, local classified websites, etc. that can be a very effective tool. Whatever you choose, know what you want to advertise to get the most bank for your buck!
