When putting up a website, most small business owners place their faith in the adage, “if you build it, they will come.” They commission a web design company to make a decent-looking informational website, and within a month their business is online.
But then a few months go by, and nothing happens. Not a single sale comes through the website.
The saying, “if you build it, they will come” may have been true in the old days of the Internet, but not anymore; competition among businesses online has gotten to be too great over the years. A plain old informational website just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Herein lies two important secrets to online business success: 1) focus your website on some sort of customer action, and 2) create your website content to revolve around that action.
Secret #1: Focus on a Customer Action
We’re currently redesigning our Simpleslice.com website. We found that our current website, although clean and crisp-looking, could be improved to have a more apparent goal for our potential customers. Sure, we’ve got a “Contact Us” link on every single page. But what’s the motivation for a potential client to contact us? To send us a friendly message? To ask us for a free website quote? It’s kind of ambiguous. There’s no overall goal.
Sam Brown, a freelance web developer in Scotland, has a very distinct goal with his blog: to get readers to subscribe to his RSS feed. On the top of every page, in big letters, he promotes his RSS feed with a random, clever tagline. Is it any more obvious what he hopes his visitors will do after visiting his site?
When a customer knows that you want him or her to do when visiting your website, they’ll be more likely to do it! It just makes sense.
Be creative in selecting a customer action. It doesn’t always have to be to just “fill out a contact form.” It could be purchasing a product, requesting a free quote, signing up for a free trial, or anything else related to your company. In his essay titled, “The Power of the Marginal,” Paul Graham explains that the most successful businesses are the ones that are different from everyone else — so be creative when deciding on an action.
Once you’ve selected an action that you’d like to move your customers toward, it’s time to plan your website content accordingly.
Secret #2: Create Your Content Around the Desired Action
Now that you know what you want the customer to do, you can plan out the rest of your website. Everything on your website has to drive the customer towards your desired end action.
Businesses will often put too much text on their websites. Droning on and on about your company or product merits will only bore customers. Avoid this marketing fluff as much as possible. If the text on your website doesn’t gently nudge your customer towards the final action goal, don’t include it!
Giving information about your company and its products is important. It serves as an informational basis upon which your customers make decisions. Yet, you can transform even product descriptions to help lead your customers towards the action goal.
For example, let’s say your goal is to have visitors sign up for a free trial of your product. Instead of saying, “our product will help you…” say, “As you try our product for free, you’ll find that it helps you…” This little shift in focus will help drive customers toward your end action goal.
These are just two (of many) secrets that will help your business’s website succeed. We’ll keep you updated as we apply these principles to our soon-to-be-redesigned Simpleslice.com website.
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