This blog post is part of “The Ultimate Guide to Web Development” blog series.
The most important activity for marketers today is building assets. If you had a factory with machinery, then that machinery is an asset to the company — it can be used provide ongoing value to your company.
As a marketer, you can build assets as well. If you build a website that has lots of links and you’re getting good traffic from the search engines, that’s an asset. If you create a blog on your website that a lot of folks subscribe to and visit and read your blog on a regular basis, that’s also an asset. If you build a big presence on social media and lots of people are following you.
And to me as a marketer, those are the types of things that you should think about doing. You should think about, “How am I building assets to continue to add value to my company so I can minimize the amount of cash that I’m spending each and every month that isn’t helping me build an asset?” Not only will building assets help you focus your marketing spend, these assets will continue to produce traffic and leads and sales for you now and into the future.
Your website is the only web asset that you own – use it well!
Talk about me, don’t talk about you. This is hard to do, and it’s the single biggest mistake we see over and over in websites. Talk about me, my needs, my challenges, my concerns. Don’t talk about you and your company (at least not much).
Take this blog post for example. If this topic is interesting to you and speaks to one of your concerns, you’ll read it. Right? But if the topic was “15 Ways We Can Optimize Your Website to Maximize Lead Flow”, well. . . do you really care (at this stage of the game) what WE do? No! You may not even know who we are! That’s OK, because I’m talking with you about YOUR challenges. And (hopefully) providing you with some good information along the way.
No music, please! I’m at work, quietly browsing your website, when suddenly something starts making music, or a video is set to auto-play. If I’m bombarded with your theme song or a talking head on a video that is auto-playing and I can’t instantly find the stop button — well, what do think I’m going to do? I’m pretty fast with both the back button and closing tabs in my browser. Bye-bye. Let visitors choose to play your multimedia content; don’t force it on them.
Love your generic stock photography! We all fall prey to this one. . . please steer away from the happy people reading a report together photos, and use pictures of your own staff, clients, pets, whatever. Or take a photo from a movie and add some text to it to make a meme. Or sketch something on a piece of paper and use a photo of it. Or try photo-sharing sites like Flickr or FreeFoto to find interesting photos.
Make it easy for me to contact you. Let people get in touch with you via email, the phone, and social media, and make that information available on your website. Make it really available. Add it to your footer, consider adding it to your header, and have a contact form. Please don’t use just a “contact us link” that tries to open my email software, because, like millions of others, I use web email so those links don’t work.
Include social sharing icons. You’d like me to share the great information on your website, wouldn’t you? Make it easy for me by including social sharing buttons. Maybe I’m not your ideal prospect — but I had lunch with your ideal prospect just yesterday. I now I can send her a link to your content through social media.
These buttons make social sharing easy for your readers — they don’t have to copy and paste your URL, shorten it, and compose a tweet. And easy social sharing options means your content gets more visibility, which means more site traffic, better search engine rankings, and more lead generation opportunities.
Blog regularly, and frequently. Want more website traffic? How ’bout more targeted website traffic? A blog will achieve this for you. Consider the opportunities of having a blog:
- Every blog article (post) is a new page in Google.
- The more pages you have in the search engines, the easier it is to find you.
- You can post a link to every blog article in multiple social media channels.
- You can talk personally to people.
- Watching traffic to your various blog posts let’s you know what your readers are interested in.
- A blog post is an excellent place for calls to action — help people engage further with your content.
We recommend at least a minimal level of blogging at twice a week, every week. About 400-500 words should do. Write about topics that will resonate with your readers.
Use calls to action. Align your call-to-action on a blog post to the content in the blog. And then make sure your landing page is aligned to the offer that people clicked on. There’s nothing more frustrating than being promised a 50% off coupon in the call-to-action copy, only to redeem it and find there’s a caveat that says you must first spend $200. On select items. In-store purchases only. This is not only insulting to your visitors, but it will also kill your reputation and the conversion rates of your calls-to-action and landing pages.
Call to action can be used on web pages and blog posts. Help guide people to take the action you want them to take by using appropriate calls to action.
Go mobile! Your visitors already have! Look at your website traffic and see how much of it is coming from mobile devices. How much more is that than last year? Even if you think people would never come to your website via mobile devices, they probably already are.
Help them by making your website mobile-friendly. Google predicts that searches from mobile devices will overtake searches from PCs this year. And according to research by the investment bank Morgan Stanley, the number of mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers connecting to the Internet will, for the first time, exceed the number of web-enabled laptops and personal computers in 2013.
And please eliminate that Flash movie or slider on your home page! Flash is an older technology and is not supported by any mobile devices.
These ideas will get you started on optimizing your website for lead generation. Want to learn exactly what you need to do on your website to generate a consistent level of high-quality leads? Join us for our upcoming free webinar, “Optimize Your Website for Maximum Lead Flow” on June 5th.
Photo courtesy of USFWS Headquarters
This blog post is part of “The Ultimate Guide to Web Development” blog series.
