Spirus' online marketing blog series continues:
So far, we have looked at the importance of your website making a quick impression, and how video can help with engaging browsers and hopefully converting them into customers.
In this blog we want to continue that theme and challenge a couple of widely held misconceptions about the purpose and approach of your website.
One of the great advantages of the internet is the ability to reach a vast global audience. However, there seems to be a fairly commonly-held belief that simply building your website and advertising your products or services on it is enough to start selling. The temptation, therefore, is to try to make a quick sale – after all, every business needs to make money, and what else is your site for anyway?
However, when was the last time you stumbled across a website you’d never visited before, and immediately purchased something from it? It’s just not how people tend to use the internet. We need to be convinced, we need to develop trust: we need to build a relationship with a business before we throw our money at it.
So here’s the key. Your online marketing, your website, all of it, needs to be in it for the long haul. Of course your ultimate aim is sales, or you wouldn’t be in business. But how you do it is crucial.
Your website isn’t all about selling. You need to establish trust and familiarity, become known for good service, knowledge and reliability. If you can get that right, the sales will follow later, and will gain pace as relationships grow. There are so many other businesses out there for you to compete with, and you need to give your customers a damn good reason to keep coming back to you
You need to generate leads, and to do that you need to engage with people, grab their attention, and give them a reason to come back to you time and time again. That doesn’t always have to be special offers of course; you can add value in so many ways, with practical advice and resources, with particularly good product guides or entertaining content. Invite feedback, encourage customer dialogue, grow your reputation [link to other blog here]However you differentiate yourself and make your impression, it needs to be more about attracting people and making them want to use your site over and over again than about a quick sale.
It’s not easy and it’s not always quick. You need consistent representation across all the online (and offline, above, below and through the line) marketing you do; you need to think about what people want to see, how they consume media, how they respond to traditional advertising. Some of our later blogs will help with your communication strategy once you’ve got people signed up – in the meantime, it’s time to change the way you think about your site, and the way you think about the people who visit it.