Almost everyone has a website these days – or two or three. Unfortunately, people don’t realize that traditional marketing rules still apply. If you advertise on a billboard, you want that billboard to be on the interstate between California and Vegas. You want it to impress people and you want it to attrack eyes. You’ve got to know the basics before you spend your money – or you’re likely to never see a return on your investment. At PIXRITE, we like to suggest three things to help ensure your billboard is effective.

Step 1: Be Desireable
Have you ever found a website to be less than what you were really hoping for? I don’t love it when I do a search on a topic that I really want to find some valuable information on… and the first 30 listings take me to garbage websites with useless link farms and endless loops of clicking and clicking. Have these user-friendly and useful websites not done their homework on how to get optimized for search engines? Online, we have about 3 seconds to convince someone to listen to us. Isn’t it worth the research to figure out who is most likely to return, who needs our info on a daily basis, what colors those people like, how much time they have to spend, and what time of the day are they stumbling upon our valuable propositions? Does your website communicate the value people expect to find? Even more importantly, do you have any idea what those expectations are?

Step 2: Be Available
We, as people, like to depend on constants. We like to know the sun will rise. We like to know our batteries are fully charged. We want the light to be green before we hit the intersection. Nothing is different when we sit down in front of a computer. When we find the information we are looking for, we want more! We want to know someone is sitting in front of their computer (somewhere in the world), who speaks our language, knows our needs and can help us figure out the next steps. More than that, we want accessability to that quality whenever we’re ready for it. If you’ve gone cheap on your hosting or you’ve forgotten to post listings in local directories or maybe your chat agent decided to take an extra smoke break, your customers can figure it out, almost instantly, and just from your home page. We’re not saying you need to site by the phone and wait for that phone call – but we can certainly help you to improve your consistency and deliver that message throughout your brand and your online presence.

Step 3: Love Your Customer
Usability is so often sacrificed for very stupid reasons. Once you have a fish on the hook, do you let it hang out there, break out another pole and throw your line for another? We try to discourage that. Sometimes people go hungry just because they can’t find the honey and nut version of the staple they need to survive. We like to tell our customers that anyone who comes through their door/online portal is an opportunity. Clicks are certainly not cheap these days. If someone is spending more than that 3 seconds on your home page – you need to keep them there. How do you keep someones interest? Show them the love! Give them some incentive to take your offer. Make your site so enticing that they find themselves lost before they realize they’ve clicked fourteen times. Trust is built slowly – so it will be your job to convince your customer they can get everything they need with “just one more click”. And when they click, GIVE IT TO THEM.

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