There’s such a diverse range of organizations and businesses interested in effectively capturing the inbound visitors to their website. Whether the reason is for sales of a product/service or gaining attention for a cause, here are 3 keys to focus on when upgrading your website for effective inbound marketing.
- Brand Image
- Functionality and Design
- Target Audience
Brand Image
This is a fancy way of explaining what people imagine when thinking about your service or product. Since this is the initial impression visitors will have when visiting your website, design this brand image with purpose and clarity to best represent what your company.
Essentially, this is like judging a book by its cover. The graphics, colors, words, positioning, and other visual characteristics of a website, must be carefully chosen to reflect the personality and character of the service or product being offered.
Even when an organization is offering a common product or service, the brand image can set them apart from the competition. It can be thought of as a filter, which sifts through visitors, retaining only the target audience. This target audience will resonate with the brand image, relating to the persona behind it.
When developing a brand image to apply to your upgraded website, remember that you can’t please everyone. This brand must be uniquely fit for your organization’s personality, matching the end of the line service or product being offered.
Functionality and Design
This is where the rubber meets the road for effective inbound marketing. After a successful marketing campaign and a well-developed brand image, the visitor now needs to be funneled into an effective inbound marketing strategy. This means that the functionality of the website must be conductive and accommodating for capturing any interest a visitor has.
The entire point of upgrading a website is to better connect with visitors, thus effectively capturing their attention and funneling them into a sale or further connection. To accomplish this, you must create easy to locate and use contact forms. Also landing pages must be polished and inviting by providing clarity with a visually pleasing design.
Aside from the design, functionality is the strategy of website development and is used to capture sales and a loyal target audience. The strategies employed to reach this end are numerous, thus innovation and technological expertise are helpful here. Also helpful are proven practices and analytical data; depicting audience demographics and behavior.
Target Audience
Knowing the target audience your trying to capture through a website upgrade, helps in the development of your overall strategy to increase inbound sales. This is fairly obvious, but focusing on effective methods and tools to gain this understanding is key. This understanding will save time, effort, and money by eliminating inefficient marketing and website development efforts.
What this means is finding the CRM analytical tools needed to pin-point the demographics of your target audience. Then research and strategize the best methods of reaching them through website optimization and marketing.
After a clear understanding is gained of your target audience, the next step is to develop effective marketing campaigns to bring them to your now optimized and upgraded website. Social media, email newsletters, advertising, website blogs, and a presence on related forums, are all different ways to reach out and gather a target audience.
Conclusion
Imagine how much more effective your organization or business will become with an upgraded website! This is an effective way to get an edge on the competition, and establish a recognizable brand among the industry you’re in. It’s a great way to increase sales and ensure a sustainable long-term business.
These 3 keys to focus on may seem rudimentary, but are key nevertheless to developing an effective inbound marketing system. There’s nothing worse than going to a neglected website that has pages missing, is hard to navigate, and is difficult to understand. This is never conductive for sales, and is wasting a lot of inbound sales opportunity.
Having an upgraded website that’s effectively optimized for inbound marketing, will not only take advantage of the opportunity the regular visitors bring, but will also bring in many more visitors with effective marketing and website SEO strategies.
