Far too many businesses fall into one of the deepest digital marketing traps.
They spend ages conceiving a new website. It gets designed, built, tested and launched with a huge fanfare, but there’s just one problem.
Several months later, the website appears to have achieved nothing; no leads, confirmed orders or even contact made as a result of people visiting its pages.
What gives?
In these circumstances, there’s a high chance the website has been designed, built and tested without keeping the customer in mind. Clearly, you’ll want to avoid that, which is why it’s essential you follow these four guiding principles for a customer-friendly website.
A website simply can’t survive without content.
However, that doesn’t mean you can simply slap on any number of words in order to ‘bulk it out’ and make it look half-decent. For a website to be truly customer friendly, it needs fresh, relevant and engaging content.
Make sure the homepage, product pages and blog are well-written, unique and relevant to your audience. If they aren’t, why would anyone bother reading them?
We’ve seen far too many poorly thought-out business websites.
You’ve probably encountered them, too. After entering the homepage you’re left confused about what to do next, which link to click or what form to fill out to get what you need.
Your business website should have a clear, relevant layout the audience can relate to.
That means clear menus, obvious calls-to-action and a site hierarchy (i.e. the order of pages) that makes sense if you’re looking to find out more about your products and services.
Once again, this is something you will have experienced as a consumer or buyer at some stage.
You enter a website and set foot on what you believe is the right journey to find what you want. Only, it isn’t, because you get lost in a myriad of links, different menus and no clear call-to-action.
If your business website has a confused customer journey (or, worse, there isn’t one at all), people will never get in contact with you or make a purchase.
Which leads us onto our last principle…
Potential customers need to be tempted into buying something. Your website’s role in that process is to give them a clear path to a purchase (see last tip) and to give them what they need to make an informed buying decision.
Check your website now; are there clear buying signals being sent out? Are you at all tempted to make a purchase yourself?
If not, your website is nothing more than an inadequate digital brochure, and we’re pretty sure that wasn’t your intention when it was built.
When was the last time you visited your website with the mindset of a customer? This is another trap business owners fall into; neglecting the needs of the people they want to attract online.
Sometimes, you have to put yourself in their shoes.
Try it; pretend you want to buy something from your own company and see how easy your website makes it to do so. If you stumble across any hurdles relating to the above principles, it’s time to make some changes.