Through our experience of introducing clients to inbound marketing, we have noticed that companies often neglect the potential optimisation possibilities of their websites, in particular their homepages. Missing out on homepage and website optimization can seriously harm your inbound capabilities and can drastically prevent performance expectations.
It may look stylish, modern and be newly completed but unless your homepage grabs your prospects attention, entices them with a story, and succinctly explains why your business is the best within your industry (which it needs to within a few seconds!) your marketing is not up to scratch.
Your website is your most important online marketing asset. Treat it with care with continuous updates and upgrades based on performance data. If you’re not effectively managing your site, this could explain why your inbound marketing may not be performing the way you expected it to.
Here are a few tips to help your home page effectively capture and convert leads going forward
Make a Moving Message.
It has been proven within psychological research, that consumers buy with their hearts more than their heads. If your home page is only filled with features and benefits, you may be missing out. You should help your customers get to know you, like you and finally trust you.
To connect with your customers emotionally, you need to disrupt the status quo. People don’t like changes - so it is important to help them understand the risks of not changing. By delivering a disruptive and emotional message through your marketing strategy, your consumers will be ready to hear what you have to say.
Tell a Narrative.
In the same way that consumers buy with their emotions, they also tune into memorable stories that they can connect with and internalize. It is difficult to remember features and benefits, but when they are married with a narrative, it is more likely to stick in your brain.
Stories hold a beginning, middle and end, so your homepage needs to communicate a similar flow. Start with your emotion and disruptive message. Secondly, explain what you do and why it is different to others. Then to conclude, describe how you will help them achieve their goals. You can then even add other business you have worked with and possible awards. Skip any of these components and you will have a story book missing a page!
Speak their language, not yours.
Make sure your website is for your prospects, not just about you. It might be easy to just talk in depth about your company and the products or services - but at the end of the day your consumers won’t connect with you. They only want to know how you’re going to help them and deliver on the challenges they face.
When you create the copy for your home page, skip the technical jargon. Your visitors don’t want to spend time interpreting your site - so keep it simple. If you can’t explain it in a sentence or two, you’re not ready to launch the new page.
Offers Available That Convert
Finally, you need to always consider how to turn visitors into leads – Let’s not lose sight of the websites main and only objective. To achieve this goal, you need the right offers in the right places. Home pages traditionally get top-of-the-funnel offers that appeal to the widest audience. You could put a bottom-of-the-funnel offer too as long as it is further down in the narrative of your page. Resist the urge to include lots of offers on the home page, as offers out of context can cause confusion and effect your prospects buyers journey and conversion rate. For a more in-depth explanation of which content to produce at different stages of the buyers journey, click here.
Think about your website as the front of a shop. It must be welcoming, warm, clearly visible and an entrance way to other information. You only have a few seconds to make a first impression and if your homepage is missing any of these characteristics, you could be sending high-quality prospects away before they’ve even got their foot in the door.
Optimize Your Home Page
We now have so much performance data on all clients, home pages, bounce rates, click through rates, conversion rates (…the list goes on). So, no more guessing if your home page is working or not – Marketing your company and optimizing your homepage is now pure science that you can utilize.
If you need any help implementing these changes to your website or want to discuss the application of inbound marketing further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our free consultation offer.