Before we all learn something amazing, let me explain why “Hear” is in the title.
This is the second article of a 5 part series that will teach you the fundamentals to making a website WIN, and how you could be applying these really important fundamentals to your website. I wouldn’t want you wasting your time trying to learn something that is only going to confuse you.
I’ve put lots of thought into this series to make it as clear and understandable as I can. Let’s be real – you’re probably annoyed and confused when someone with “tech” experience that you’ve approached, preaches something so important about your website….but you have no clue what they’re talking about, nor does it get you a step closer to reaching your goals as a business owner.
Let me help the best I can.
I like to think a website is a bit like a human. No, no, I’m not trying to argue that a website is better than a human or is even similar. A human has many many important functions that we can use to understand websites, and those are all of our five senses – sight, touch, taste, hearing and smell. Today I’m going to be discussing Hear.
Hear Me Out
Hearing is our listening sense. It’s about people listening to you, being heard and being found. The internet is super noisy and it can be really difficult to make yourself different from the rest. It’s also important to listen to your target audience.
1. Know Your Business More Than You Already Do
If you think having a website is a simple business showcase with some relevant information and photos about your business, I’m here to tell you, you’re wrong. Although, it’s partly true, you need to have more of a strategic approach when designing or making site changes to transform your website to be more effective.
How “effective” the website is, is dependent on how well you appeal to your target audience/customer/client. How you appeal to your target audience/customer/client is dependent on what your business’ objectives are. Your business objectives should be those things that if you do improve, will help grow your business. If growth isn’t something your business is seeking, then your objectives could be around stability, efficiency and profitability (which should be in the picture for all businesses).
For example, your business might have an objective to generate more leads and sales. In this case, your website audience would be targeting your customers or clients. If done properly, your website could save your money on ad spend or make your ad spend more effective (if your ads were directed to your website). Getting new leads and customers might not be the solution to your business’ problems. Your business’ problem could be that you’re short staffed, hence stopping your business from growing. In this case your website should be less targeted to your customers and more targeted to potential good candidates/employees.
How To Target The Right People To Your Website
Whenever you’re targeting a person, you need your solution to be very specific to your target customer’s problem. A good place to start is by creating a customer avatar. A customer avatar is an imaginary person you create that is an exact depiction of your ideal customer. Get creative with your customer avatar. Give them a memorable name. You could name it Bob, whatever will stick in your head to be able identify your target customer’s characteristics when you are planning to do any sort of marketing. Don’t know how to create a customer avatar? Well here is some things to ask yourself:
- Who are they? (business owners, managers, consumers ect.)
- How old are they?
- What do they do?
- What do they want to achieve?
- What do they want to avoid?
- How are they motivated to find a solution and are they aware of your solution?
- What’s the best way to communicate with them? (videos, text, presentations)
- How do they usually buy?
The more specific you are, the better.
2. Get The Most Important Sentence On Your Website Right – UVP
You need a Unique Value Proposition (UVP) on your website. The UVP is a sentence that informs your visitors what your business does and also indicates what sort of help your business will be to them. If someone asks you in a conversation “hey, what does your business do” you can respond back by using the UVP you’ve used for your website! People don’t have a very big attention span, so give them what they want, but quick!
You need to keep in my mind what I mentioned earlier in the article. You need to think about your target audience. Your UVP should most suit your target audience. For instance, if your target audience is made up of humorous people, you could make your UVP funny. If making people laugh is going to keep them interested with your business, then it might be worth it. Your target audience could be the flip side of this example, and they might be serious people. In this case make it a practical, easy to understand and to the point.
Let’s take a look at an example.
Trello: https://trello.com/
Trello is a good example of a simple but effective UVP. The horribly drawn circles around the bits of text is not a part of their website, it was drawn by me for the simplicity of what I’m about to say.
Red Circle: The red circle is the main UVP. It’s a short piece of text that convinces their audience to keep reading or to keep listening to what Trello has to say. The effective thing about this UVP is they haven’t just said “Trello is a project management tool”. Oh boy, I can’t stress this enough – people don’t buy things, they buy solutions to fix a problem they have. So when you’re marketing you shouldn’t convince people to buy your product. You convince them that they have a specific problem and your solution facilitates that problem. Sell the solution not the “thing”… that’s a commodity. Unless you’re Gucci, don’t sell the “thing”. Trello, sells the solution. They tell their visitors who they are (“Trello”) and how they can help solve the problem (“lets you work more collaboratively and get more done”).
Yellow Circle: The text inside the yellow circle is an extended UVP. The purpose of this is to give more information supporting the main UVP (the red circle). To help create the extended UVP just ask “Yeah, so what” to the main UVP and hopefully you’ll have an effective extended UVP. The text of the extended UVP is smaller, this is so it’s not the thing with the most attention directed to it – that’s the main UVP’s job. If visitors are curious about the main UVP they’ll move on to the extended UVP to find out more information about the solution.
Pink Circle: The thing in the pink circle is the Call To Action (CTA). A CTA is essentially the business’ desired action from the customer. In this case, it’s to sign up for Trello’s software product. The UVP is used to direct the visitor to the action. They are convincing the visitors they have a solution to a problem, then the CTA is for the visitor to jump aboard and become a customer. You can tell Trello’s main objective on their website is to get more sign-ups. “Contact us” is also another popular objective for businesses.
The internet is extremely noisy – there’s a lot of crap and information out there. To stand out, you have to be more unique, different and more clear than the rest of the herd in order to get heard. Your UVP can help do that. If you don’t have a UVP, make one now, it’s absolutely fine to change it later, in fact, it’s better to keep changing it if it keeps getting better every time.
3. Get Customers/Clients Without Them Knowing Who You Are
How do you [inset sub-heading ^]? SEO is the answer. You may have heard that word before, you may have not. SEO is a technical term which stands for Search Engine Optimisation. If you don’t know what SEO is, it’s the practice of optimising your website (and your business) to appear better on Google (Google is a search engine). If a business is “doing good SEO” or “has good SEO”, they are using strategies or tactics to make their business further visible on search engines or ranking higher on search engines. Despite the tech crap you probably don’t care about, the benefit of having an SEO strategy is that it will help increase traffic (visitors, viewers ect.) to your website.
When you search stuff on Google, you use search phrases to research anything that exists on the internet. Your search phrase is used to find the most relevant websites according to your search. For instance, if you search “how to tie a shoelace” on google, you’ll get relevant results of a list of websites on how to tie a shoelace. SEO is important when you want people to be able to find your business or a product/service you offer. Rather than people finding your business on the internet just from referrals, people can find you by searching something they need. In other words, you need to find out what YOUR “how to tie a shoelace is”. You need to find out what phrases you want people to be searching for in order to land on your website.
Yeah whatever, but how?
Google needs to know what your business is and what solutions you solve before your webpages start effectively appearing on Google. The way to do this is to have keywords in the content of your website. Keywords are relevant words or phrases that are on your website. Relevant words or phrases on your website tells Google who you are, so their algorithm can understand what your business is. So do some research about what people are searching for, and what your business wants to be searched for. The key to getting customers without them knowing who you are is having relevant content on your website. SEO can get more complicated, and it’s not an easy game to play, but it can definitely pay off.
Your Next Steps
If you’ve learnt something in this article and know it’ll help solve any holes in your business, take action. Things you can do now are:
- Create a customer avatar of your ideal customer or client.
- Create a UVP that’s focused on solving your ideal customer’s or client’s problem and how you’re the one to solve their problem.
- Create relevant content using keywords on your website in order for your webpages to become more visible on google searches.
If you’re ready to level up your business with a new website project we can help! Let’s solve!