Does Your Site Achieve the 3 Main Marketing Goals of a Website?

It may seem straightforward, but nothing trips up business folks more than the question, “What are the goals of a website?”

You see, these days, building a website for your business is one of those “necessary” steps. Most folks agree you need one and most businesses build them because they feel they should.

Unfortunately, building a website without considering why you’re building it often leads to a situation where the site becomes a constant drain on your time, attention and money.

Even worse, without goals your site is not living up to its full potential as a marketing tool for your products and services. What a waste.

So, to help you make the most of your site’s marketing potential, this post lists and discusses the 3 main marketing goals of a website. If your site is not achieving at least these three goals, it is not working as hard as it can to help your business succeed.

The “Front Line” of Online Marketing

Your website is the online branch of your business. Even if you sell your products and services elsewhere online, or offline for that matter, your customers are going to look for you online – believe it!

Why? Because no matter what type of business you run, consumers often turn to the web to learn more about your company before they contact or visit you in the real world. ¹ This is true even for businesses that are completely offline:

1. If you own a restaurant, 53% of your potential customers want to research your restaurant online before making a reservation ².
2. If you own a brick-and-mortar store, a detailed study has “found that consumers in all age groups tend to go online first for information about local businesses! In fact, 81% of the 18-34 year-old age bracket search online first, while 69% of the 35-59 year-old age bracket search for local business info online before venturing out.” ¹
3. If you provide a service, you can’t depend on referrals alone. In fact, in 2011, after getting a recommendation about a product or service they may have wanted to purchase, 85% of consumers still went online to do additional research before deciding whether to purchase it and were more likely to make that purchase if they found additional recommendations on the web. ³

Since your site is typically the first exposure that potential customers have to your business, it becomes the “front line” for all of your online marketing efforts. If you do not have a site, you will not have a front line and you risk losing the battle for customers before it even begins.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Your potential customers expect you to have a website and, if you do not, you will likely pay the price by not winning their business.

Your Site’s First Marketing Goal

The first goal of your website is to build customer trust. Why? Because trusting people will buy your products and services; non-trusting people will not.

Therefore, it’s important for your site to be inviting and meet your visitor’s expectations. What do I mean? Let me use a real-world example to explain:

1. When you visit a store that is brightly lit and clean, you instinctively feel trust. Your trust grows when you can find what you’re looking for easily and then grows even more when you encounter helpful and friendly staff.
2. On the other hand, when you visit a store that looks abandoned and messy, you instinctively feel guarded and nervous. Your distrust grows if the store is organized poorly and it’s hard to find what you’re looking for and then grows even more if you encounter unhelpful and grumpy staff.

When it comes to websites, you want your site to be like the first real-world store, not like the second. You want everything about your site to build confidence that you are a great company with whom to do business. The table below shows how the real-world examples above translate to the online world and your website:

THE BOTTOM LINE

You only get one chance to make a good first impression and, these days, your site is often the place where that impression occurs. Make it a good one and build customer trust.

TAKE NOTE

Just because your site needs to build trust by making a great first impression, you do not need to spend a ton of money and time on a website that wins awards for amazing-ness. That’s a mistake many businesses make, much to their regret.

You can build an inexpensive site that is clean, inviting and provides easy ways to get in touch with you, and just leave it at that.

To learn more about website types, and how to build each, take a look at my, “How to Build a Business Website” guide.

THE BOTTOM LINE

You do not need to spend a lot of time and money to build and maintain an effective website that meets the expectations of your customers and allows you to reach your business goals.

Your Site’s Second Marketing Goal

The second goal of your website is to encourage and enable customers to take action. What actions you want your customers to take on your site depends on your business goals, but the three most common types of actions are:

1. Purchasing products or services,
2. Contacting you, and
3. Submitting forms (newsletter signups, contest entries and anything that allows you to capture personal information such as e-mail addresses, gender, age, income and any other info that can be used in further marketing efforts).

The key to getting your customers to take action is to include “calls to action” in every appropriate spot on the site. These calls to action should be:

1. Kept to as small a number as possible can so your customers do not become overwhelmed and end up taking no action. The calls to action you should make are the ones that best help you achieve your business goals.
2. Made as simple as possible. For example, if you want customers to sign-up for your e-mail list, make the form as simple as possible by asking for only the e-mail address and maybe the first and last name.
• If you get over-ambitious and also ask them to fill in their gender, street address and more, many of your customers will see the form, get overwhelmed by how much they need to fill out and stop before they even start, even if the fields are not required.
3. Placed in appropriate spots in an attention grabbing, yet not gaudy, manner. Stay away from flashing banners and marching text. 🙂

THE BOTTOM LINE

Driving customer action is the goal of all marketing and that’s no different online. Enable your website visitors to take action with simple and clear “calls to action”.

TAKE NOTE

As with any marketing tactic, you need to track the effectiveness of your calls to action. When a customer takes an action, this is called a “conversion” and it’s more important than any other metric you track online.

Many times, I’ve worked with clients who have a lot of traffic to their site, but do not see a lot of customers taking action (i.e. a low conversion rate), whether that’s sales, contacts or newsletter signups. After analyzing their site design, content and visitor analytics, we were able to make changes that increased conversions.

Some of these changes were as simple as moving the call to action to another spot on the web page, others were as complex as redesigning their marketing messages from scratch. Whatever it took – the goal was always to increase conversions because that’s what businesses need in order to achieve their goals online.

To learn more about increasing your site’s conversion rate, check out my post, “How to Sell More on the Internet by Increasing Your Website Conversion Rate”.

THE BOTTOM LINE

You need to track conversions to measure the effectiveness of your calls to action. If conversions are low, you need to adjust your site’s design and/or content to raise the number

Your Site’s Third Marketing Goal

The third goal of your website is to serve as a spot where you house your useful content so that search engines can find it and thus direct interested folks to your site (learn more in my small business guide, “Content Marketing”). These potential customers then read the content and are exposed to your products, services and marketing messages at the same time.

Of course, this goal is only applicable if you make use of inbound marketing. However, if you do, your site lies at the center of it all because that is where your content can be found.

Even if your content exists on other websites, you should always include that content somewhere on your site (see the table below for a couple of examples). This way, all of your content lives in one place that serves as the ultimate information resource for your potential and existing customers.

THE BOTTOM LINE

A company’s website lies at the heart of any content marketing strategy. It needs to become the ultimate information resource for both potential and existing clients even if your content lives somewhere else online.

TAKE NOTE

It’s important to remember that getting your target audience to your site using content marketing is only the first step.

If you do not achieve the first two marketing goals of a website, building customer trust and successfully encouraging and enabling customers to take action, all your work to get them there via content marketing will be for nothing.

THE BOTTOM LINE

High traffic to your website means nothing if your site does not successfully encourage visitors to take action.

Weekly Link Roundup

Each week, I collect the 10 best posts that I’ve read and share them with you here.

These posts focus on web-based solutions, online resources and up-to-date news for small businesses.

Enjoy!

The Most In-Depth HubSpot Vs. WordPress Review Ever Written: Finally, a serious and thorough look at the difference between these two platforms.

8 Reasons Why Cloud Computing is Even Better for Small Businesses: A clear look at the advantages of cloud computing for small businesses.

LinkedIn Rolls Out New Targeted Follower Tools For Marketers: I’m excited about these two new tools coming to LinkedIn!

Top 3 reasons you must follow your competitors on social media: An interesting look at why it pays to keep an online eye on your competitors.

10 Proven Ways To Market Your Website: Basic but solid tactics for marketing your website.

Developing a Mobile Marketing Strategy with Kent Lewis: A solid but basic look at this topic (also see my post, “Are You Ready for Mobile Marketing?”)

Keeping Track of Your Expenses: Three Apps to Check Out: Check out these top picks for expense tracking on the run.

Five Easy Ways to Speed Up Your Website: Nothing drives away potential customers like a slow site. Learn how to speed up your site with these tips.

4 Ways to Use Twitter for Customer Service and Support: A handy look at how to use Twitter to serve your customers.

How to Create a Survey that Drives Business: Interesting look at how to carefully craft a customer achieve to get the best results.