Experts have estimated there are more than 1 billion sites on the world wide web. Even the most specialized site has thousands of rivals. In a world where competition expands daily, how can you learn to “market smart” – ensuring your message rises to the top and gets the attention of potential customers?
Have a Responsive Web Presence
A good website is responsive: It adapts to the needs of your users. Most people think of responsive design in terms of making sure your site is compatible with the latest mobile technologies, including smartphones and tablets. However, this is just the beginning.
A truly responsive site provides a customized experience tailored to your audience!
Reaching this point requires deep knowledge about your prospects: Who they are, what their interests and worries are, and how your enterprise can help them. Responsiveness also includes your social media and other customer touch-points.
How to Get Responsive? Recognize Your Goals
No matter how excellent your site is on launch day, it has to evolve to stay effective. The core goals of any new site are the same, but your team must strive to reach them in more effective and creative ways.
What are those goals?
- Attract strangers to your website;
- Convert strangers into leads;
- Close leads into customers.
Once this process is mastered, a website can generate ongoing revenue. A website serves as a tool that sells to your intended audience 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
To tap a site’s potential, create a personalized experience for each user!
Build a Buyer Persona – Then Build a Site Around It
Your “buyer persona” represents what you know about your customer. It includes things like the age, gender, geographic background, interests, wants, and fears of a segment of your market. Begin with your target – your ideal customer. By developing a clear picture of this person, you guide fundamental website design choices.
Your ideal customer might be the core of your research, but it is equally as important to wisely use this information and customize their experience. Lets use Netflix, a very popular streaming website, as an example. They look at your previous viewing activities and then recommend the shows they think you will enjoy most. This is no coincidence. They provide information based on rules they input for your website and people get categorized based on their history on your website.
No matter what your offering is, a sales manager will have a different focus and expect different information than a CEO. A 
homemaker wants information relative to them, not a teenager or student. Although some aspects of your site will be the same for everybody, all visitors should feel like your site is talking to them. That way, your message will resonate with each one. You can customize user experience based on personas created through a comprehensive buyer persona development plan.
Be a Thought Leader: Tell Users What They Need to Know
How do you ignite the first spark and attract strangers to your website? It’s easier than you may think. You begin by understanding the questions your best customers have and then answering them! Make sure you’re influential in all of the avenues your prospects are present with blogging, e-Books, whitepapers, and more. You should post them not only on your own website but on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.
When people go online to search, they’re usually trying to answer a question. If you’re there with the answer they need, in the format they want, at the very moment they ask, then your brand will register in their mind as a trustworthy authority on the topic.
Merely knowing the answer isn’t enough: You also need to be willing to share it, either freely or in exchange for a bit of your prospect’s information like their name and email address. This might seem like giving knowledge capital away, but it’s an investment in the most important commodity, Trust.
Launch, Monitor, and Evolve Your Campaigns Based on Real Metrics
With direct mail, it took months to know if your campaign was effective. Now, you have the opportunity to get crucial information in real-time, empowering you to make instant changes that can save – or earn – millions.
To do it, your marketing campaign needs to track and adapt to key metrics.
In addition to total reach, the number of visitors your site attracts across all methods, you should break traffic into reach by channel and visits by source, figures that help optimize your expenditures. Some metrics, like visit-to-lead conversion rates, measure your site's effectiveness. Low results can mean content, design, or messaging should be adjusted.
Luckily, there are tools that will allow you to track these items individually and see how they are interrelated. In time, you’ll learn to make changes rapidly enough to capitalize on trends, while still waiting long enough to ensure your data is sound. If you would like to learn more about these metrics on your website, check out these Key Metrics To Track For An Inbound Marketing Campaign.
Inbound Marketing Brings it All Together
Inbound marketing ties together the methods above, synthesizing them into an efficient approach that can grow your business profits for years to come. To learn how inbound marketing can work for you, feel free to call or email us today.
