Podcast

How To Engage Your Website Visitors

(Transcript)

Hey guys, MC from Candybox Marketing here. Thanks for tuning in!

I really appreciate all the positive feedback from the last episode. I am so glad you found it useful to make your website work for you. If you didn’t catch the last episode, no worries, I will add a link in the transcript below.

Last episode: Audio-Blog: Build Your Website For Customers, Not For Yourself

Today I want to focus on how you can become an awesome story teller on your website to engage the people who are visiting for a short time.

One of my favourite TED Talks was by the well known speaker, Simon Sinek. He talked about how it is crucial to market yourself by following the formula: “Why – How – What”. He used Apple as a great example and shared how they sold themselves by sharing WHY they do what they do. Their ads spoke about challenging the status quo and being unique instead of just announcing that they sell cell phones and music players.

Your website should be no different.

Through my experience with most websites, it is common to see businesses start by sharing what they do, what their services are, what they offer, and then they tell you how to buy before they even tell you WHY they are the right fit for you. This is a super outdated way of marketing and if you are guilty of this, I highly urge you to change the way your website communicates to your audience.

As I mentioned in the last episode, your customers don’t care about what you want. They care about what they want and they are quickly trying to figure out if you are the website they want to do business with.

Instead of simply telling them what you do, start the conversation by telling them WHY you are the one they should do business with. In marketing terms, we call this your value proposition.

What makes you stand out and unique versus your competitors? What does your business do better than anyone else?

If you have been in business for more than a decade now, then your business should talk about how much experience and expertise you have. Do you service a large number of customers every year? Make sure your visitors know that you are in the big leagues. Are your customers raving about your customer service? Bring this to the front of your site through a testimonial section.

Once you establish your ‘WHY’, everything in your content, photographs, graphics, and videos should lead by sharing this message with your visitors.

Most of the people that visit your website will only spend up to 15 seconds on the site before they decide whether they want to do business with you, or simply leave. Get the right messages across to them as quick as you can.

Once you have your ‘WHY’ messages in place, start focusing on showing your customers ‘HOW’ to take the next step. These are called: your call-to-actions.

I have come across way too many websites that do a great job navigating their potential customers through the website: to the product page, to the service page, and sharing really good content.

The problem is that once they bring them to the right page, they just leave them there. Your website should have a strong call to action to virtually hold your customer’s hand and walk them through the final step.

If your WHY did the job and really sold them on your business, this is the right time to give them some direction and ask them to contact you or start purchasing.

The final step is to tell your visitors WHAT you do. Although I harp a lot on businesses who spend time talking about themselves, the reality is that there is a place where this is acceptable. Spend some time strategically sharing a bit about your business and speaking to what products or services you offer.

If your visitor has spent way too much time scrolling and navigating through your website, they are probably interested in learning about you and what you have to offer. This is also a great opportunity to improve your search engine ranking by using the right keywords about your business.

You may have noticed that I spent a lot of the time talking about WHY. This is because I truly want to stress how that is more import than anything else when it comes to engaging your audience. If you are going to do one thing exceptionally well, focus on your WHY.

So just to recap: the content on your website should be structured in a way to

1) Tell your visitors WHY you are the right business for them,

2) Show them HOW they can buy your products or services and

3) Share what you do and what you offer.

Next episode, I will talk about the infamous main hero banner of your website and, believe it or not, why using sliders can actually work against you instead of helping you.

And hey, do me a favour. If you like what you hear, let me know in the comments or share it with others that you think can benefit from this.

Thanks again for tuning in!