How to Turn Your Site’s Visitors into Customers

Posted by Kerry Townsend //
 December 10, 2018

Getting your business up and running online with a nice, professional website is certainly rather exciting. There is nothing more rewarding than to take a tour through the clever digital design behind what makes your website truly stunning to view. Yet, despite all the bells, whistles, and dazzling graphical displays, it has been a month and you are still waiting to make your first sale. Sure, your site has had a few hits.

But, for some reason, the traffic visiting your site is not signing up for an account, not placing items in the cart, or not proceeding to the checkout. This scenario can be frustrating to a business owner that has spent large sums of money to develop a website that does not generate much revenue. To make matters worse, when you visit other lesser sites, it seems like their business is booming. What on earth is going on? Probably a lot more than you realize. Here are some ways you can tweak your website to start turning visitors into paying customers.

Keep it Simple

Many online businesses start out missing the point of how to convert leads to sales with a website. The problem is far more common than you might think. These companies build a website that is jam packed with so many options to choose from that the sheer volume of options is overwhelming to the people visiting their website. Most online consumers hit up websites looking for something specific, and having an endless menu of too many options can actually hinder user experience. It is far better to scale down the volume of options on your website to make it easier for visiting traffic to find what they are looking for quickly. When visitors see too many options, they will flee your website faster than they came to it. When they see an easy way to move through categories or search for precisely what they are looking for, then you are in a much better position to convert visitors into paying customers.

Related: Lifehack

Reviews Are Critical

Most customers trust online reviews as if they came from a friend or family member. When your website has no product or service reviews, it can be difficult to compel potential visitors to follow through with the sale on your website. Also, reviews give repeat customers reasons to return to your website again and again. Today’s online consumer is far savvier about reading reviews before buying a product than in the past. Product and service reviews are a critical part of an augmented user experience that leads to improved customer satisfaction.

Related: Podium

Faster Load Times

There is nothing more frustrating for a potential customer than to visit a website and sit there for what seems like forever waiting for your company website to load. Lengthy website loading times are one of the biggest turn-offs to online customers who demand quick and easy access to the websites they grace with their presence. In fact, if your website takes longer than 2 or 3 seconds to load, then chances are you lost the customer before they ever took the time to browse through your site. Fixing any problems with a slow-loading website are critical to keeping customers around.

Related: Launch Digital Marketing

Make Them An Offer They Cannot Refuse

The general rules for marketing and piquing customer interest still apply online. Sometimes you have to get the ball rolling by giving a little to get some reciprocation from your website traffic. If you make a tempting offer on your website that is hard to walk away from, this will go a long way to getting people to buy your products and tell their friends about the great deal they got from your website. There is no shame in using a few tried and true website marketing approaches to get a desired outcome. You can be sure that most successful websites do that and more to keep customers loyal to their brand.

Related: Cope

Summary

There is far more to building a website than slapping it together, crossing your fingers, and hoping to make millions overnight. For most online companies, there is a learning curve to developing a website that is truly effective at appealing to web traffic and converting leads into sales. To generate real customer loyalty, your website has to truly become a hub for customer satisfaction, and this may be a huge insight lacking in your design efforts. This is why it is critical to do a lot of research into what makes some retail websites more successful than others. You never know when grasping that one truly revolutionary website design idea will change the whole way your company interacts with traffic online.

 

Digital Age Marketing Tactics That Generate Sales for Your Small Business

Posted by Kerry Townsend //
 August 17, 2018

In today’s digital age, it’s crucially important to take advantage of online marketing channels. After all, people spend more time than ever on their phones and laptops, and it only makes sense to do your marketing where your audience will see it. Fortunately, it’s not hard to start doing digital marketing well, although it takes a little know-how and practice. Focus on these four approaches to online marketing, and you’ll soon find that you’re generating more sales than ever before.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around for a long time. In fact, it’s the oldest tactic on this list. Despite its age, email marketing is still going strong, and for a good reason—it works remarkably well. Email is often the first thing people check in the morning and the last thing they check before going to bed. If you can get into your audience’s inboxes, you’ve got a good chance of turning them into repeat customers.

To do email marketing, you’ve got to convince people to sign up for your email list. The simplest way to do this is to incentivize sign-ups by offering something in return. Customers are much more likely to give away their personal information if you provide a downloadable, discount, or freebie in exchange.

Content Marketing

Content marketing gives numerous benefits to your digital marketing strategy, so it has become an exceptionally popular strategy right now. This tactic involves creating a variety of helpful content—which might include blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, and even memes—that’s associated with your brand. The more content you create, the more easily customers will be able to find your business in search engines. Content marketing also establishes your authority in your field and can increase customer trust, giving you an edge over your competitors.

Social Media Marketing

Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are great places to connect with your customers. While this tactic may not make you many direct sales (because people don’t typically log in to social media with the intention of buying something), it can boost your brand’s visibility. This makes customers more likely to seek out your brand when they do want to buy something later on.

You have to know your audience to make social media marketing work for you. Which social networks do your customers use most? Focus on just two or three social media sites where you’ll get the best return, instead of trying to maintain a presence on all of them.

Retargeting

Retargeting is a powerful way to ensure your business stays at the top of a potential customer’s mind. In a nutshell, retargeting means that people who visited your site but left without buying anything will continue to see ads for your business around the web. Numerous types of marketing software can help you set up retargeting campaigns.

Wrapping Up

If you want your small business to succeed, it’s important to understand digital marketing. Put these tactics to work for you, and your business will thrive—both online and offline. For more practical advice on how to optimize your website and your marketing strategy, contact us today!

Stock photos; finding royalty free images

Posted by Linda Carlson //
 April 3, 2018
Reading Time: 2 minutes

We get questions about stock photos from our clients quite often. When it comes to photos for your website – especially content marketing, blogging and social media – you need that extra visual punch. But stock photo services are expensive for start-ups and small businesses. I regularly advise my customers to use free stock photo websites to keep these costs down, whenever possible.

But turning to Google Image Search for photos won’t cut it. The search engine doesn’t allow you to view user agreements and can trip you up if you go this route. Copyright and license infringement is no joke and can bring hefty fines.

You might think, “It’s just a photo!” However, digital products are big business today. Photo supplier, Getty Images has, “an archive of 80 million still images and illustrations” according to Wikipedia and they are known for their feverish pursuit to enforce their licenses. To avoid legal headaches, here are some simple steps to ensure your business is protected.

Read More →

So Why Does Your Website Hate You?

Posted by Kerry Townsend //
 March 28, 2018

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Okay, a website cannot hate you. It’s not artificially intelligent or biological, it can’t THINK about hating you. So, hate may be too strong a word but, the feeling may still persist.

How do you make it better? The website, I mean. Here are some things that I see organizations doing wrong, time and time again. Most of these will only cost you some of your time, some will cost very little money. Some of these are able to raise the confidence and comfort level of your visitors. While others increase the visibility and popularity of your company’s website!

Read More →

How to not get Caught in Google’s Mobile Speed Trap

Posted by Giselle Aguiar //
 February 15, 2018
How to not get caught in Google's Mobile Speed Trap
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Google recently announced that beginning July 2018, the loading speed of your website on mobile will affect how Google will rank it. 

Basically, if your website takes too long to load on a mobile device, Google will ignore it and bring up the website — which loads faster — that matches the searcher’s query. 

The good thing is that you have till July to fix your website. So, you ask…

How fast should my website load? 

Read More →

29 Best WordPress Plugins For Your Site

Posted by Kerry Townsend //
 July 10, 2017
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Here is a list of the best WordPress plugins that we use on many sites that we build and support. An ailing website has a difficult time at best to become useful and productive. We have had good experiences with all of these and recommend them for the purposes outlined here. 

  • If you are not paying for WordPress maintenance on your website, then you sorely need these plugins to keep your site healthy and safe.
  • If you are building or supporting a small number of websites these are a great way to gain a more professional reputation. If you are trying to maintain more than say 10 websites, you should seek tools (online or offline) that require less intensive labor on your part.

WordPress Plugins That We Use and Recommend

One caveat! Please don’t install a bunch of recommended WordPress plugins from anyone’s list without first learning what each one does and how to use each one. You will only frustrate yourself and have a really ugly time wrestling with your website.

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