When you put up a new website, the immediate tendency is to go hog wild with generating traffic. SEO, paid search, social media—get out there and bring in those visitors! But if nobody’s buying, your website can still fail.
Traffic is great, but it’s only half the picture. In order to improve online conversion rates, you need to generate quality traffic and optimize your site for their benefit.
Would you know your ideal client if they walked through the door?
If your ideal customer came walking through your door, would you recognize her?
Ideal clients are a bit like the Holy Grail of marketing.
You can spend lots of time and resources searching for them, but they can be hard to find if you don’t know precisely what you’re looking for.
Creating an image of your ideal customer enables you to narrow your marketing efforts as you seek to reach those most likely to buy.
If your target market is “everyone,” then you not only have a business model that will likely limp along or fail entirely, but you’ve also misunderstood the goal of marketing.
Your marketing efforts don’t need to convince everyone that you’re the solution to their problems. They simply need to identify the people who need or want what you have and convince them. To do that, you must narrow your focus by becoming a specialist.
Find a niche that hasn’t been filled and become the very best provider of that product or service.
Do you know how your ideal customer looks, feels, and thinks?
Flesh out a picture of your ideal customer. Study the demographics and psychology of the people you are targeting in order to determine what motivates them and how you can best present your business in order to grab their attention.
I’m taking an ad writing class from Howie Jacobson. As part of the class, we had to create an avatar which we will use as we write our ad copy.
Once we’ve described our avatar, Howie is having us each write a diary entry from our avatar’s perspective – using their words – to describe the feelings and emotions compelling him (or her) to start a search for our product/service.
It’s a really interesting exercise, because it forced each of us to take off our marketing hats and pretend to be our ideal client. To walk in their shoes, think like they might think, and then express it in a diary or journal entry sounds easy, but inhabiting your ideal client is hard work.
You don’t necessarily need to write a journal or diary entry for your ideal client, however you should be able to write a very clear description – capturing both their external and internal selves.
Remember that within your target audience, you will find a number of different buyer types, or personas. Take the demographic information you’ve identified and flesh it out using different psychological profiles in order to create a variety of customer personas. Then, use those personas to determine how you should present information on your website and in your ads.
Your ideal customer may be just out of reach. By taking these four steps to identify him or her, you can bring that customer within the scope of your marketing efforts, increasing conversion rates and earning the right to be heard.
Related Articles: Target Market – Defining your Niche
Are You Missing the Target?
If you find yourself stressing over not getting enough of the “right kind of leads”, you may not be doing a good job of targeting the type people you want to work with.
Repeat after me: You are not your ideal client! Don’t assume that they want the same things you want or that they think the way you do.
If you can’t clearly identify the people you’re trying to reach, work on answering these three questions before you proceed any further:
“If you build it, they will come.” Really? This famous saying may apply to ghostly baseball stadiums, but it’s hardly applicable in the world of online marketing.
Many businesses unconsciously follow this business model as they’re setting up their website.
They build and optimize, design and promote, but they fail to perform the most important step of all: differentiation.
I’ll admit it, I love having a GPS. No longer do I have to drive into gas stations and ask directions… my little lady is there to guide me through rights, lefts, detours and alternate routes until I hear the magic words “your destination is on the right”.
When you’re writing for your website, your copy needs to provide a sort of GPS for your readers. Good copy will guide them to the information, products and services they need or want.
Here are some things that can help improve your copywriting GPS system:
Perhaps the most important element of your landing page, the headline has the power to engage your readers’ attention and funnel them toward conversion.
Poorly written headlines can also increase your bounce rate faster than a kid on a pogo stick. By honing these five essential copywriting for conversion techniques you can use your headlines to pull people in and convince them to keep reading.
The trainer I work with on and off at the gym is always on me about improving my core or abs. It’s her contention that strength training begins by strengthening your core, and that without a solid core you’re prone to injury. Makes sense intuitively, even though I’m not wild about more sit-ups, I do make the effort to work on my core.
What does all this have to do with your website? Well, think of your company’s value proposition as the core around which everything about your website and marketing strategy needs to be built. Without a strong value proposition the whole website doesn’t hang together the way it could. Plus, your messaging tends to lose focus and drift.
Everyone talks about target market, but how do you know whether you’re actually reaching yours? Learn to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by answering these questions:
There are plenty of opinions out there about what makes good copywriting. The bottom line for your small business, however, is that you need the copywriting on your website to convert your visitors into customers.
As you plan your next website redesign, you’ll undoubtedly spend a lot of time working to improve home page appearance and effectiveness.
While testing and experience will dictate many of the specific changes you make, don’t neglect to incorporate these four goals in order to get the most out of your home page.