Three Keys to a Successful Website Marketing Program

What does your company stand for? Throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks doesn’t work anymore with websites. Cheap tricks—such as cute animations—don’t add much value, and worse, distract your key prospects from your primary message.

Your home page is not there to establish your brand. Rather, it’s to get visitors into your website where they can learn about your brand. It’s asking too much to think that one quick look at a home page will accomplish more than excellent navigation. That’s a difficult enough challenge and plenty for one page! Its purpose is also not to sell me everything you are dying to sell me or to sell individual items.

No commercials please. No ego-building videos that amount to letting your audience know how smart you are. Instead, provide visitors with a well-communicated, small set of choices of where they can go to next. And keep it simple. People prefer easy navigation to complex website structure any day of the week.

Start with what your prospects and customers want to find or learn when they arrive at your home page. The better defined this is, the better your chances of giving your guests a satisfying experience. Did you know that approximately 85 percent of all search ends in frustration and only 1 of 20 people will search beyond the first search screen?

The reason is, people can’t find what they are searching for. This places even more importance on delivering a website experience that is highly rewarding to your guests.

Providing unique distinctions is vital. An example is offering multi-shots of your product vs. showing one static photograph over and over again. The objective is to make the user experience visually interesting. This increases your ability to be persuasive where and when it matters. Small details like this can easily mean the difference between someone clicking for more information or clicking off your site.