Six proven steps to turn your website into a powerful tool for attracting new customers.
Just another pretty face?
Chances are you’ve dropped a pretty penny and/or a significant amount of your valuable time on your new website. Now, its finally up – congratulations! But where are your new customers? Are the people you want even finding your site? Or is it like a tree falling in the forest?
SEO, Keywords, Paid Ads. Yes, these are all tools for helping drive traffic to your site. But the dirty little secret is that unless you’re providing useful information in a way that’s accessible to the people you want to reach – nobody cares.
Here are six proven steps you can take to turn your website into a powerful tool for attracting new customers.
Step 1: Get inside your customer’s head
Imagine the last time you used Google. What did you search for? Which websites did you find the most useful? Which did you immediately leave to check the next result in Google’s list?
Chances are, you had a question about how to achieve something you wanted, or avoid something that you didn’t. You probably spent the most time on the websites that gave you the most helpful and understandable answers to your questions. And the least on those who boasted about how great they were or who had such dense, technical information that your eyes glazed over. Next!
Now imagine your ideal customer. What problems are they trying to solve?
Step 2: How can you best help them?
Help them in their quest! Make it easy for your visitors to find useful information and easy to understand answers. Make your content easy to skim because – who reads entire articles on the web anymore? Did you even finish this sentence? Clear summaries at the top of each page so they know what they’ll find. Clear headings over each section so they can jump right to what they care about.
Step 3: Make it all about them
So many websites are a showcase to how great the company is. But most of your visitors are coming to you for answers, not to hear about how many awards you’ve won.
More You’s. Less We’s. From the top of your homepage to how you write every blog post, the website should be centered around helping your visitors with that they need.
(Yes, of course, your credentials are important and a critical part of your website. But they shouldn’t be the first thing people see, and you shouldn’t be the main subject of your content. Start by first making them care by proving yourself useful).
Step 4: Use their language
You’re an expert in your field, which is why you’re so amazing. It’s also why customers want to work with you. Because they’re not experts.
I’m taking my car into the shop. I don’t want to hear about how you have to assemble my new break pads (or to even know if that phrase makes any sense). I just want you to make it so my car will safely stop when I want it to.
Talk about what you can do in terms of the value it provides your customer. Not in terms of the underlying technical details. Test your messaging out on people in your target market, how do they respond?
Remember that you have about two seconds for a visitor to decide if they want to stay on your site or if they want to click down to Google’s next result.
Step 5: Give them something irresistible
I like this example by Neil Patel.
It’s immediately obvious when you land on his page that he’s going to help you grow your business by generating 195,013 (an oddly specific number) of visitors each month without spending a dollar on ads.
In fact, if you go to his site, you’ll get a popup — which normally I loathe, but I actually filled out in this case — offering me a free webinar that afternoon on customer acquisition.
Wait? Free?! How can I make any money?
Well, first you pull them in with the irresistible offer (a free webinar in this case). Then, once you’ve got your foot in the door, you sell them on the real product (in this case, a class so expensive that I wouldn’t have even considered it before seeing the value of his webinar).
Step 6: Turn them into customers!
Okay, depending on your business it might not be quite that easy. But figure this out: What’s the #1 thing you want them to do? Buy your product? Join your community? Sign up to to receive more great advice from you (ala mailing list)? Contact you to learn about how they can work with you? Something that turns them from anonymous visitor into real customer lead.
Whatever it is, make it super easy for them to do it with a well placed, highly visible call to action buttons (like the orange button above on Neil’s site).
Remember that if you’re providing great advice throughout your site, most people’s first encounter with your site will be on a page other than your homepage. Don’t assume they’ll know what you can offer. And definitely don’t leave them hunting through your menus for your list of services, or for a Contact Us link in the footer to figure out how to work with you.
Guide them to what you want them to do at the mere click of a button.
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Have questions? Let me know in the discussion below and I’ll do my best to answer!
