How to Make Sure Your Web Site will Bring Results

October 31, 2006 2:54 pm by Jarom Adair

3 Steps to Effective Web Site Marketing and Promotion

I get calls on a regular basis from business owners who ask me if I could “take a quick look over their site and see what I think.” This usually translates into “We’d like to make sure there aren’t any major, blatant problems with our web site before we bring more people to it.” It may be a new site or it may be an established site about to experience increased traffic from a new marketing campaign. Regardless, your business web site needs to work well with your marketing and promotion efforts.

I’m happy to spend 10 minutes on the phone giving anyone my thoughts about their web site (feel free to contact me), but there are a few things I usually touch on no matter the situation. The top three are…

1: How Well does Your Site Fit Your Marketing?

When people visit a new site, they always have expectations about what they’ll find on that site. They get these expectations from your marketing material.

When your site doesn’t match your marketing…

One friend of mine started marketing his web site though a pay-per-click campaign. When someone typed in “mastermind group” in Google’s search engine, an ad for his site would appear. People who clicked on that ad went to his site expecting they’d find information on a mastermind group, but when they arrived at his site there was no mention of mastermind groups at all. All they found was something that was, as far as they could tell, completely unrelated.

Predictably, most people quickly left his site.

When your site does match your marketing…

Good marketing will bring interested customers to your site. When they get there, you must know enough about your customer to show you know their needs and have a way to fill those needs (for more info, see “3 Things You’d Better Know About Your Customers”). The first page they visit on your site needs to speak to those needs. If someone comes to your site with expectations of what they will find and they find it immediately, you will have a much better chance of turning them into customers.

Targeting many groups

If you have many different groups you are marketing to, you may need to create many different pages on your site tailored to each group. You want the first page somebody visits to meet their expectations and speak to their needs. If possible, you can even have entire web sites dedicated to serving specific groups of people, each site leading them to do business with you because their first impression of you met their expectations.

2: Testing Your Site’s Effectiveness

You’ve now created a web site based on your customer’s needs. You’ve creating a marketing campaign to draw them in that leads them to a web page that speaks their language. But you’d still like to know if you’ve missed anything. What do you do?

Testing it out on a friend

It’s time to play the “who do you know” game. If you want to sell to dentists, who do you know that is a dentist? Is your target small business owners? Who do you know that’s a small business owner? They don’t have to need what you have to offer right now. You are not going to try and sell them anything. I personally know lots of small business owners that don’t currently need a web site, but if I offer to buy them lunch and ask them for their help they are usually more than willing to go through the following exercise with me (which exercise I recommend you go through):

1) After you’ve fed your friend, who is also one of your target customers, sit your friend down at a computer.

2) Show your friend your marketing materials. Whatever it is that you’re using to market your site, whether an ad in a magazine or a listing in a phone book, show it to them.

3) Next, bring up your web page on the computer and hand over the mouse to your friend. Ideally this is a friend that has never seen your site before.

4) Wait and see what they do.

5) Keep waiting. Don’t say anything.

6) Still don’t say anything.

What you’re doing is seeing how your friend interacts with your site without any help from you. You may be tempted to say “Click here” or “Read that” or “You missed the most important information on the last page” but if you’re friend isn’t doing what you think they ought to do or isn’t finding the information they ought to find, there’s a chance your other visitors won’t either.

7) After giving them a chance to click around your site for a while, ask your friend questions. Good questions include, but are not limited to:

-What did you think about the site?
-Was it what you were expecting based on the advertising I showed you?
-Was it professional / understandable / easy to navigate / informative?
-What didn’t you like?
-What information did you find helpful?
-What do you wish was easier to find?
-Was there anything obnoxious or distracting?
-Would you buy something from this web site? Why? Why not?

Whatever your friend tells you is a good indication of how effective your site will be on other people who come through your marketing efforts.

Lastly…
8) Follow steps 1~7 with at least two more people. You want to base your actions on a group of people, not a single person’s opinions.

3: Measuring Effectiveness through Web Statistics

Looking back at the first example, how did we know people were quickly leaving my friend’s site when they couldn’t find anything on “mastermind groups”? Answer: We had his web statistics. It was easy to see that everyone who came to his site through that pay-per-click campaign spent virtually no time on his site. It was money down the tube, but at least we knew what wasn’t working and how we could change it.

Once you’ve spent a bit of time creating a site and the marketing material to bring people to the site, and you’ve run it past some of your target customers, the final step is to keep an eye on how well it’s doing. Even if you’re getting the desired result from your site (people buying products, ordering services, joining newsletters, etc…) there are likely many areas that could be improved on.

Monitoring your traffic and statistics

By monitoring what people are doing on your web site you can make all sorts of educated decisions concerning what is working well and what isn’t. I recommend Google’s free analytics package to get started, and information on what to look for once you get your web statistics can be found in my article “How to Triple the Effectiveness of Your Web Site“.