The quickest way to build an online presence is by developing a Website or landing page. And a Website and/or landing page basically provides the foundation for all of your campaigns to follow. The problem that many companies face, however, is that they build a Website without planning out their entire marketing campaign. As an Internet marketing firm, we always recommend telling your prospects a story and thinking about your online marketing as an immersive campaign, in order to achieve the best result. You want to get your prospects immersed into what you can do for them.
So, how do you achieve this? If you have an existing Website, ask yourself if you have a clear message with, ideally, a single call to action. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of simplifying what you are communicating and asking your prospects to do. The bottom line is that the more options you have for your prospects to take, the more difficult it is for them to make a decision, which reduces the conversion rate of your Website. The best performing landing pages or Websites are single column sites with a single offer. If you have multiple columns on your site with multiple calls to action, you may be compromising the results of your site.
A great way to work through the process of simplifying your site is by getting back to the basics, which is all about your message. To establish your message, start off by listing your customer’s pain points and desires. Then outline the key benefits of your product and list how you provide the benefits. Follow this by outlining or developing social proof to support your claims. And finally, outline your offer. With this information, you are ready to create your sales letter to communicate your story on your Website!
Start telling your story through your sales letter with a quick hook and benefit statement in your heading that pulls them in to your body copy. Then show them that you understand their pain followed by some quick benefits of how you will help cure their pain. You then want to expand on how you will do it in some detail, but not too much, because you have to sound like you know what you are doing. Then provide social proof to provide third-party support for the claims that you are making. And finish it off with an offer that they can’t refuse such as a free offering that creates value for them. An e-Book would do the trick.
In terms of technology, there are many ways that you can develop your sales letter. It can be developed in plain text, as a video, or as a video/text sales letter. It depends on your industry. We’d recommend testing different variations until you find what works. Within your sales letter, include a Web form, so prospects can opt-in and become a lead above the fold and throughout your sales letter, where feasible.
Once you have your sales letter, start working on the design of your site. Again, try to reduce the number of columns, choices, and even the navigation of your Website. It’s simplicity and clarity of message that produces results, not an online brochure. It’s fundamental selling, not fancy technology that works.
Once you have developed your Website copy, start planning out the rest of your campaign. You want to build a relationship with your prospects from your social media channels to your lead generation channels. Everything needs to work together as a single system. Your ad text should be properly aligned to the content on your landing page, etc. And it doesn’t stop with advertising and a great Website. You just started telling your story.
To establish a relationship with the leads that you are generating, you want to build a campaign that provides on-going value to your leads, so that when they are ready to make a purchase decision, they choose you, not the competition. We covered a lot here about the 3-Zones of Internet marketing. For more information on this, download the free 3-Zones Internet marketing e-Book. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment. We’d be happy to help.