The customer has landed

When your customer lands on your website how easy is it for them to understand what you do/sell/provide?

Web surfers are impatient, have the attention span of a gnat and finding an alternative that’s ‘easier’ is - easier - than struggling with anything that doesn’t deliver what they want fast.

Here are 10 things that will send your traffic running to your competition:

1. Faded video in the background that takes up the whole of the first screen with no indication of what you do.
2. Stop-start images visible anywhere there’s content - don’t distract your visitor from your message.
3. No headline or ‘Welcome’ or ‘Home page’.  You need a proper headline to engage your reader and get them to want to read more - on every page.
4. Leaving it to the third or fourth screen before presenting your products or services.
5. Scrolling marquees with text (e.g. testimonials) that move too fast for people to read all the text.
6. Black backgrounds with light coloured text (e.g. Black/white, dark blue/pale blue, maroon/gold).  It‘s much harder to read than dark text on a light background - and results in a big drop in comprehension - not good news for you.
7. Justified text - that’s where all the lines are forced to be the same length.  People often lose their place in the paragraph.  Centred text isn’t great either, left-aligned is the easiest for people to process.
8. Very wide paragraphs.  Anything longer than 100 characters (including spaces) in 10-12 point gets uncomfortable for the reader as they have to move their head to scan from the end of one line back to the beginning of the next.  They probably won’t realise it consciously, it just feels ‘wrong’.
9. Light grey text on a white background - it needs to be at least 90% black.
10. Too many things in one screen.  Stick to 3-6 services on your home page, but don’t put testimonials on one side and other text in the middle or a video next to a sign up form (that can go underneath).

This may sound fussy - but anything that is a barrier between your message and your audience makes no sense at all - no matter how beautiful it may look!

You’ve got mail

What’s the difference between a newsletter and email marketing?  Some people will tell you that a newsletter should be information, while email marketing is promotion or sales.  However, there’s information - and ‘information’.

I’ve said this many times before - but people aren’t interested in your new mission statement, your move to new premises, your latest team members, promotions or even new products and services - unless there’s a clear benefit for the reader.  So a newsletter that’s mostly company information is going to get either deleted or unsubscribed from altogether.

When it comes to email marketing it tends to be a series of messages rather than just one, but if these are a straight sales pitch you’ll get more deletes and unsubscribes than sales.

So, you’re probably wondering if emailing potential (and existing clients) and other connections is worth it.  The answer is ‘yes’ if you get your messages right.

Crafting a great email

1. The subject line needs to shout ‘open me’!  That means you need to know what your readers’ problems are and address this in your subject line.  If you haven’t got a crystal clear, detailed description of your ideal client, this is your first task (TIP: there’s a template you can use in the Treasure Chest)
2. The first paragraph needs to engage your reader by either talking about a pain they have or telling them about something of great benefit to them.  It also needs to be conversational.
3. Paragraph two builds on the first part, either contrasting the pain with the benefits or vice versa.
4. A subheadline is a good strategy to re-engage their attention (just in case, they’re not big readers!)
5. In the next paragraph give them something of value - a tip, a strategy, a 3 step process.
6. Close by delivering your promise and call to action.  This could be the promise of more information of value, a discount for earlybirds or a limited period or a code to enter to get a special price.  Then tell them what to do next - and provide a button that links to the sales page, your phone number or easy-to-follow instructions.
7. Sign off
8. Add a PS - ideally with more value.

TIP:  If you write blogs that give great information - use these to lead your newsletter with valuable content.

How social is your media?

Social media seems to be the answer to everything these days - whether you’re trying to build up your business, recruit staff or reconnect with people from your past.  I use it to stalk my children, stay in touch with people who aren’t just around the corner, promote my business, build relationships with interesting people and much more.

Social posts come in many flavours - do any of these ring a bell with you?

‘Let me share my life’

This poster shares every detail from a picture of the coffee they’ve just bought to their latest purchase on ebay.  You get to know their partner and all their idiosyncrasies, their kids achievements and lots of cute (and not so cute) pictures of them in action, their pets, their hobbies - nothing is overlooked.

‘I want to inspire you’

This is the serial quotation poster.  They love a good quote and they seem to have an endless stream of words of wisdom from both well-known names and total unknowns.  Some of them are great, but the daily deluge of good thoughts can be a tiny bit overwhelming.

‘I love cats’

… or dogs or dancing or music or [enter your current passion here].  Like one of these posts and you’ll find you’re getting lots more similar posts appearing in your feed - and, while I have time for the occasional cat video, it’s all too easy to find they’ve sucked an hour out of my day.

‘I’m going to persuade you …’

This is the poster on a mission to get you involved in their latest campaign - whether it’s to banish plastic from the world or save a child in Africa.  I’m a big believer in charity, taking action to improve our planet and helping others generally, but I hate being told I ‘have to’ do something.  My rebel comes out in force!

‘I’m only here to promote my business’

This person has been told that social media is a great marketing tool (and it is), but they don’t engage with people unless they’re showing signs of parting with some money.  They post loads of sales messages, but don’t actually talk to their ‘community’.

‘Isn’t this a numbers game?’

The aim of this person’s game is to make as many connections as possible and then tell people how many ‘friends’, ‘contacts’ or ‘followers’ they have.  They don’t read their home feeds, answer messages or have conversations.

Of course, you know some of these people - but you don’t fit into any of these categories do you?!

Why bother blogging?

As a business owner or a consultant your blog is where you show off your knowledge, expertise and experience.  It’s the platform where people who are looking for your kind of expertise can see how good you are - even before they part with any money.

Given the choice between an unknown supplier and one that clearly knows their stuff, which one would you choose?

Of course, a blog on your website has all kinds of other advantages:

It helps your website get seen by the search engine spiders

I have to admit that I imagine lots of little black 8-legged creatures running around the world wide web when I mention them, but every search engine reaches out and checks over the websites of the world to see if they’re worth ranking.  New content means that your website registers higher on the spiders’ ‘interesting’ scale, so they keep coming back.  If nothing on your site has changed since their last visit, they’ll just leave it longer before looking again.

It’s good for SEO

Providing the blogs on your website are relevant to what your company does you’ll be using the keywords that you want your site ranked for.  This aids SEO and helps to push you up the ranking (although there are lots of other things that an SEO expert will want to do to improve things even more).

It feeds your social media

Given that all the people you know aren’t going to keep rushing off to your website to see if you’ve written a new blog, it makes sense to promote it on social media and link back to your website.  You can take soundbites from your blog to post on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and use the image on Pinterest and Instagram.  These can be used more than once - as long as your blog is still relevant and isn’t topical.

It gives you material to use elsewhere

If you’re invited to write an article for a business publication - review your blog first.  You could have something that needs only a little editing already written.  Even taking a couple of blogs on the same subject and combining them would work.  You can also take a few blogs around a subject and edit them into an ebook that will help potential clients.

A blog written regularly can turn into a treasure trove!