Is Your Website a Dead End?

by Mark Bloom | May 5, 2014 | Website Content

Your Website Content Makes a Big Difference

Does your website lead anywhere?

More and more of our clients have been asking for website content. There’s good reason to upgrade your website content, especially if your website isn’t working for you. Our two unofficial mottos are:

If your website isn’t making you money, it’s costing you money.
If you’re ignoring your website, it’s likely ignoring you.

These aren’t just clever phrases; they underline our business philosophy that every website is a potential marketing engine. If you aren’t optimizing your website for your company, you’re losing ground to your competition. The trends are clear: the Internet is the new yellow pages. If your listing doesn’t appear, you are losing business.

First Step: Fresh Content

The first thing we do for our clients is to update their websites to make sure the content addresses their target audience: their existing and potential customers. It has to welcome visitors, introduce a business and answer their questions.

We often recommend an active blog, because business blogging is an excellent way to attract new customers and answer more questions in a more in-depth manner. That makes the website more useful, and useful content online often is shared. If your visitors are sharing your content, that’s better than advertising.

Landing Pages Work

landing pages covert visitors into customers The next logical step, once the website content is working to attract new visitors, is to turn those visitors into customers. That’s the goal of landing pages.

A landing page is a special page constructed on your website that you direct people to when you want them to learn more about your products or services. The classic example of a landing page is the website page where you send web users who click on your ad somewhere else (e.g., on a social media site). By clicking the ad, they have already demonstrated interest in your company, so you want them to land on a useful, informative and active page.

In this case, your landing page must explain your competitive advantage. You have to sell your company. You have to persuade the visitor to buy your products or services. Normally, your website should not be an avenue to push your products or services onto your visitors. That drives people away. But a landing page is different. On the landing page, you want to give them options and a way to contact you or make a purchase.

Put Theory into Practice

Now that you understand how your website is supposed to operate to generate business and convert visitors into customers, get to it! Contact us for a website assessment, and we’ll give you our honest, objective feedback regarding your website’s effectiveness, whether you hire us or not. What have you got to lose, except inertia?

Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.

Converting Website Visitors into Customers

by Mark Bloom | Apr 15, 2014 | Website Content

Content Marketing Effectively Converts Leads

Here in Asheville, North Carolina, we talk about content marketing a lot. Content marketing is, in essence, turning your website into a marketing engine by supplying useful information that attracts an audience. It works, and we have documented proof. We’ve also written about quality content before.

But it’s more than that. In case you’ve missed it, the Internet is replacing the Yellow Pages as the primary way consumers are looking for your products or services. It’s a sign of the times, just like other things that have disappeared, like rotary telephones, landlines and typewriters. So if you are ignoring your website, as our motto says, your website is ignoring you. That’s not a smart business decision.

This is what office phones used to look like

So whether you hire us or not, we urge you to adopt content marketing strategies. But even if you are doing everything you can to put content marketing to work on your business website, the next question is: Will just doing this simple thing actually convert the visitors you attract to your website into paying customers?

Content Marketing Is User-Centric

The Yellow Pages will go the way of the rotary phone The answer, of course, is yes. Content marketing, if properly done, can persuade your website visitors to become clients. Content marketing employs a user-centric approach, to use a term from the 1990s. “User-centric” means that you design your website with your visitors in mind. Make their experience everything they could hope for, and they’ll reward you with their business.

You must make your website easy to navigate. Make your content easy to understand. Answer your visitors’ obvious questions and provide your contact information on every page. Provide helpful tips and advice about your industry, products or services. To sum up: make your website valuable to your community of users. “User-centric.”

When Your Customers Have Landed

Content marketing can deliver this

Even if you do all this and your website is attracting a lot of traffic, you still must sell your company’s products or services. Knowing where and when and how to do this is a science, but it’s not rocket science. One tip is to construct effective “landing pages.”

A landing page is where visitors interested in a specific topic, product or service arrive on your website through a search engine or internal link. Landing pages must answer the questions about specific topics and effectively explain how your company can solve the associated problems. It’s not a pushy sales page. It’s not an advertisement. It’s a question-and-answer session, where your company has the best answer.

Content Marketing Has a Positive ROI

The Yellow Pages will go the way of the manual typewriter A landing page can be a blog post or a website page. It doesn’t matter, as long as it satisfies the above criteria. In fact, this very blog post can act as both an informative article and a landing page, since it targets businesses that need to learn about converting website visitors or creating better content on their websites — since Ray Access can do this for you, at a reasonable cost and with a proven return on investment (ROI).

Get a free estimate. We also offer a website analysis service that can provide an objective assessment of your website.