Daniel Vaczi
When you decide to take your business online, you’re making a serious investment in your brand’s growth. Online, you have the potential to reach countless people, anywhere in the world.
As you’ve come to realize, ‘reach’ is half the battle. The other half is about generating opportunity. Your website needs to yield concrete results in the form of leads and sales.
It’s easy for some companies to become lost in the allure of a unique, innovative, and beautiful design. The reality, however, is that your ‘work of art’ could be causing more harm than good.
Ask yourself some simple questions. Are you generating substantial traffic with unusually low conversion rates? When people visit your website, do they come back? Are people finding your lead generation forms and reaching out to you, or are they just lurking?
The problem could be your website, but fortunately, all you might need are a couple of straightforward changes to solve the problem. Here are five common issues worth troubleshooting.
1. It’s tough for people to contact you
You need to make it as easy as possible for people to get in touch with you. The prospective customers who have questions are the people who may sign-on with your company down the road. If your contact forms, email addresses, phone numbers, and location are tough to find, interested buyers will flock to competitors. At the end of the day, people are time-strapped and need information quick.
Make sure that your contact information is highly visible and accessible from every page on your site, and visitors can find your company through multiple points of entry. Always make sure that your contact information is accessible through your header or footer. This will ensure that it is on every page. Also be sure to provide a real phone number and address to build trust with visitors and search engines.
2. Your call-to-actions are less than intuitive
You’ve created a website with powerful and convincing sales messaging, and you’ve managed to convince potential customers that you’re the best of the best. Now what? What comes next? Should people request more information through a form, or should they call you? What if they want to keep reading? Where should they go?
Your website call-to-action buttons should be clear and obvious. Make sure that your language and designs facilitate what you want visitors to do next. Every element on your website should lead people to a conversion point, not a dead end.
3. Your web design is missing personality
In choosing your web design elements, you’ve probably noticed that for the most part, your competitors websites have the same look and feel. There must be a scientific and tested rationale to their approaches, right? Not necessarily.
It could be that others in your industry are making the same assumptions as you, thinking that your industry needs to project a certain image. Remember that your website is an extension of your brand. If your brand is different, then your website should be as well.
When everybody else is using a cookie cutter web design, you have a clear competitive advantage. Be different, and infuse your brand’s personality into your design. Your company will be the one that stands out.
4. Your website is pretty, but it doesn’t engage
An elegant website design needs more than a beautiful look and feel. It needs to keep people interested. Design is important, but if your content is lacking value to your target market you will not hold their attention and will not convert them into a lead.
Your website should help you share knowledge, built trust, and connect with your potential clients. Valuable content is the vehicle that makes this possible. There are too many brands that prioritize looks over substance. Outsmart them, and position your website to be something more.
If you would like to generate more online leads for your organization, download our Inbound Marketing e-book. This resource will give you the knowledge to attract your target market, generate sales leads, and close deals.
