Glossary Terms:
- Lead: A person who is considering your offering
- User Flow: The path a visitor takes once arriving on your website, the order of pages they visit
- Conversion: When a lead takes your desired action, that equates to one conversion
Introduction to Website Marketing Series
In this series, we'll discuss prepping your website, driving traffic to your website to generate leads, analyzing your audience and the common user flows of your website, and finally, converting leads successfully.
If you are considering creating a website or have one but are looking for ways to improve it, you probably already have a goal of increasing awareness about your service or value.
Beyond increasing awareness, you are trying to attract the right audience members—people who are strong candidates or leads. These people will hear your message and be interested in what you have to offer. Success means they will heed your call to action and engage with your service. In a university context that may mean registering for your event, enrolling in a class or applying to be a student in your program.
Your website is one of the most powerful tools available for this type of lead generation and the first stop on our marketing workflow exploration. If strategized and implemented successfully, your website can attract new visitors, convince them that your offering fits their needs, build trust, and generate strong leads that lead to action.
The common website mistake
If there's a catch, it's that your website has to be genuine to attract true leads. Too often, clients come to us wanting a website but not ready to engage in the long-term work needed to achieve their goals. Many think if a digital presence is established, the rest will fall into place. But setting up a website and leaving it to become stale is like creating a brochure and expecting it to grow legs and walk right up to your perfect lead.
Your site should be current, engaging, and ready to serve your visitors at any time.
So, how can you be sure your website is set up and on track for success?
Creating a strong foundation: the purpose statement
Before you start diving in to lead generation and thinking about how to attract visitors, start by defining a clear purpose statement for your website.
What's the purpose of your website? Consider not only what your website is being built to do, but also for whom it's being built. We'll break it down into three simple steps.
Download our website purpose worksheet.
Step 1: Answer your core questions
The first step is being able to answer these questions clearly:
- What do you offer? (Be specific. "Consulting" isn't enough; "website consulting for small campus units with an emphasis in accessibility, strategy, and data-driven decisions" is better)
- How do you do it? (Your unique approach or method)
- Why do you do it? (Your mission)
- What makes your solution different from competitors? (Your value proposition)
Step 2: Define your audience
Now, consider who your target audience is. Who could benefit from your value the most? How do you want them to feel when they find and read your website content?
- Who is your target audience?
- What problems are they struggling with?
- How should they feel on your website? (Relieved? Inspired? Confident?)
Step 3: Create your purpose statement
Once you have answers to these questions, fill in the sentence below:
Our content should [purpose] and help audiences feel [adjective, adjective] so they can [visitor goal].
For example:
"Our content should educate beginner-level marketers and help them feel empowered and confident so they can create and maintain successful website strategies and achieve their goals."
"Our content should introduce our program of study and help them feel excited and inspired so they can explore a career that they are passionate about."
"Our content should alert farmers, agronomists, and crop consultants and help them feel prepared and reassured so they can face upcoming pest problems and outbreaks."
Congratulations! Your website has a purpose statement, but beyond that, you've clearly defined what you want your site to do. Use this statement each time you sit down with your website to make updates. Ground yourself in this statement whenever a question arises and you're unsure what your next move should be.
Build your website structure
Next, let's create a strategic sitemap for your website (we're not talking about a technical sitemap here, just a plan on paper). A sitemap can be used to plan what content is needed to articulate your purpose and how your pages should flow. When a visitor lands on your website, these are all of the pages they might need to understand your offering, gain trust, and become a strong lead. Consider what content you need to articulate your purpose statement clearly.
Common pages include:
- About: Let people learn about you: your mission, your history, team photos, testimonials, and whatever else is important to tell your story.
- Services: Describe the value you can provide. Break complex services into digestible chunks and include clear next steps.
- Value Propositions: Why should visitors pick your offering compared to others? Why should they trust you? Use specific examples.
- Contact: How can visitors get in touch if they have additional questions? Offer multiple contact options if possible and set clear response expectations.
- Conversion Pages: Once your visitors are hooked, how should they let you know? It could be a page designed to obtain subscribers, set up a visit, submit a nomination, etc. It may not be its own page at all, but leave no doubt what the next step for your leads should be.
Once these pages are written and set up, consider how potential website visitors will find them. It's possible the links will be added to your main menu, but if not, ensure there is a clear path for visitors to take to find each piece of content. Remember that visitors don't always start at your home page.
Testing your website's effectiveness
Peer review
Before you begin investing time in traffic generation, make sure your website is working as intended. Consider having a peer review it for honest feedback and an outsider's perspective. If your target audience is potential students, be sure to review the site from a mobile perspective as well.
If you can, watch as the reviewer navigates your site and see where they get hung up. You may find that they easily navigate from your About page to your Services page, but then get stuck because there is a missing call-to-action after each service.
You may find that they skip your About page altogether. Consider what you could add to make the page more appealing and your offering more approachable. It could be that adding supporting images showing your team working or collaborating with other clients makes all the difference in your approachable and trustworthy brand.
Content audit
If you already have a website, revisit your current content. Be sure it tells the story you want it to tell based on your newly defined purpose statement. Review each page and ask yourself if the value proposition is clear and if it guides visitors to take action. Remove or update any pages that get in the way or distract from your purpose.
Remember: Your website is never "done"
Think of your website as a continuous improvement project! Schedule regular reviews to:
- Update content with fresh information
- Add new testimonials
- Optimize based on user feedback
Don't skip this step. Prepping your website is vital to converting leads. There may be pressure to increase your website traffic through paid channels or to showcase a new offering mandated by your supervisor, but these efforts will fall flat without a properly set up website.
Strategic content and a proper user flow help ensure your website traffic won't get lost or be disappointed in your value offering.
Next steps
Before rushing to drive traffic to your site, ensure you've:
- Created and documented your purpose statement
- Built a clear sitemap with all essential pages
- Written compelling content that guides visitors
- Tested the user experience
- Set up a maintenance schedule
In our next post, we'll explore specific strategies for driving quality traffic to your newly optimized website.