Research – What does your perfect potential client look like?
Before you start building your website, you need to know who you are building it for. This isn’t just a website design question, this is an overall business and marketing question. Back in the day, radio shows would have pictures of their ‘average listeners’ on the walls in their studio so they could remember who they were talking to on a daily basis. Your website needs to have this level of care as well. Without having a clear outline of the people you are trying to market to, your website can’t be the well-oiled machine it needs to be.
More Research – How does that potential client search for your product?
After you’ve figured out who you are trying to attract, you need to start figuring out how to attract them to you. By using content marketing, email marketing & social media marketing – you can bring these potential clients to your well-designed landing pages and start the process of converting them from an interested person into money in your pocket.
Even More Research – How are you going to convince them to buy from you?
Great – now you’ve gotten the people to your website, now what? Understanding what is going to convert them into a client is going to dictate how you build your site. Layouts, color schemes, pictures and content are all variables that will depend on your approach of converting these people into clients.
Simple Design – Better Results
You don’t want to send your newly attracted potential clients to a site that they can’t find the information they came for, right? Designing a website that is simple and easy to navigate is one of the most important things you can spend time thinking about. You can struggle on creating content and have poorly picked stock photography and still get a nibble of a sale from time to time. But if a user can’t find the contact form or at the very least your phone number or email address – you’re not going to have a lot of success.
Thinking Through the Sales Process
Is your perfect client ready to buy the product you sell, or do they need to be educated and cultivated as a lead before they’re ready to make that jump? Cultivated leads (done through strategic content marketing and email marketing) bring in 16% more income than non-cultivated leads. Spending the time to develop a system to educate your potential client before you convert them can result in a more educated, happier, willing-to-spend-more-on-your-services client.
How to Capture the Lead or Referral
Lastly, but possibly most importantly – how and where are you going to capture the information from this potential client? And after that, where does that information go?
Having clear Call to Actions throughout the site is a good idea, but spend the time to make sure they belong where you put them. Don’t just have a contact form on a page because you want to have a contact form on every page. Your potential client needs to see the value in giving you their information.
And make sure you don’t ask too much from you lead – you haven’t even met yet! A common mistake I see is creating contact forms with too many fields. Complicated contact forms will be abandoned by many site visitors. Keep your contact forms simple, and only ask for the information you absolutely must have to encourage higher engagement.
You can find some additional information on how to build a great call to action form on our page about great landing pages.