You’ve spent a lot of time making your website look great and driving leads to the site. But now that your prospect is on your website, are they getting the right information? The right messaging is a vital part of any marketing strategy. It is even more critical on your website, where every word counts. Your website gives you the chance to showcase your brand’s personality and quickly communicate what you offer. Creating a site with the right messaging enables you to educate your visitors quickly, showcase the value that your solution creates, and pull them further into the funnel, helping drive conversions. It’s your opportunity to demonstrate that you understand your prospect’s pain points and have the right solutions to address them. Let’s talk about five things to consider when creating impactful website messaging.
Start with your WHY
Simon Sinek puts it best: “People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.”
WHY you do what you do is at the heart of your business. It drives what you sell and how you sell it. It also drives how you talk about your business. Your WHY is the perfect way to start telling the story of your business and one of the first things you want a visitor to learn about you. From there, it is easy to transition into WHO you are, WHAT you have to offer, and HOW you do it. It’s one of the most effective approaches to drive the messaging on your website and a powerful way to differentiate your business from your competitors. Before you put any messaging strategy in place, make sure you take the time to define your WHY.
Create a strong customer journey
Your customer journey doesn’t start the moment a visitor hits your website. They are likely to have found you in a search or are already familiar with your business from connecting with you on LinkedIn or another platform or hearing about you from a mutual connection. No matter what level of familiarity they have with your business, having a website with a customer-first design that takes into account where your prospects came from, what information they are seeking, what pain points they have, and why your solution is a good fit for their needs is vital to creating messaging that catches and keeps their interest.
Tailor your website to consider what a prospect wants to see or learn when they come there. Your messaging should address the customer journey and where they are in the process on any given page and any specific section. Speak directly to them and guide them through the journey as they explore your site. Talk about what makes your business unique and share what you do and why you do it. Anticipate the questions or concerns your prospects have and address them. Demonstrating that you understand your prospects’ pain points and have the right solution to address them plays an essential role in establishing credibility and converting visitors to your website into leads.
Use visual content
We are all visual learners, and visuals on your website can be essential in creating the right customer journey. Using images or video on a page helps boost engagement and provides you with the opportunity to quickly educate a prospect on an aspect of your solution or share more information about your brand. It can help a prospect quickly understand how your product or service works.
Content with visuals receives 94% more views than text-only content, so it’s also a great way to drive engagement. Visitors to your site are ten times more likely to engage with your video content than they are with the copy on your page. It also increases conversions by up to 80% when you add a video to a landing page on your website.
Have strong calls to action (CTAs)
We all have a strong desire to know what is going to happen next. A good CTA is one of the most direct ways to let a visitor know what you want them to do, but 53% of the top Fortune 500 companies don’t have a call to action on their homepage. 70% of small businesses don’t have any calls to action other than a contact page or form. With no clear journey on your website and no strong CTAs to drive that journey, your visitors don’t know what to do or where to go next. Creating strong CTAs not only provides a visitor with instructions on what they should do from any spot on your website but also provides information on what is going to happen when they follow your CTA. A prospect is much more likely to follow your CTA if they know what will happen when they do, and that helps to pull them into the funnel even further. Make sure your CTAs are clear and concise and tell your visitor exactly what you want them to do.
Be consistent
One of the biggest hurdles in winning new clients is building trust. Being transparent and setting the right expectations with your prospects is one of the best ways to build that trust and increase your credibility. Consistency in messaging across all touchpoints builds familiarity and trust while establishing authority, and means that your prospects always know what to expect next.
Having consistent messaging on your website also helps drive conversions. Take the time to understand what action you want visitors to take on specific pages. Then use your content and your CTAs to consistently drive those actions and set the right expectations for what will happen next on the website when a prospect takes that action.
Follow the data
You can think you have the right messaging and have created a strong customer journey that drives conversion. But you won’t really know for sure until you test it out and look at the data. Testing different versions and types of website content, different layouts on landing pages, and different CTAs can help you determine what works and what doesn’t. That data should drive any updates and additions to your website. Use it to strengthen the overall messaging and build a more compelling customer journey on the site.
