3 Website Design Elements That Persuade Prospects

Like Siri guiding you step by step when driving to an unfamiliar location, an effective homepage serves as the GPS of your website. When your audience lands there, they do so with a specific purpose in mind. If your “site GPS” isn’t effective, they’ll abandon your web page and likely not return.

To ensure a smooth trip, here are three elements that aid the user experience.

• Fresh Design With Graphics and Visual Effects - site design and images attracts site views and are effective methods of guiding your user. Properly structured, they’ll also benefit you in search
• Familiarity - You don't want to be exactly like your competition but if you're vastly different, you will likely confuse the audience
• Less is More - Even if you have extensive products and services, fewer top level navigation categories make it easier for the audience to navigate and find what they are looking for

How does your site stack up?

In addition to minimizing your navigation headings, you can also make them more descriptive. Consider implementing one of the following options:

1. Object Based - usually nouns that could be product or service names
2. Action Based - reserved more for ecommerce sites that describe a user action - think about a Financial Services site that has bank, borrow, invest as top level options
3. Audience Based - the industry or market segment the user belongs to - which makes it easy for them to self select the appropriate category

Illustrative headings provide greater clarity for your audience. A user can quickly choose the correct category and navigate to the page they need. Plus, you get the benefit of better search signals. Generic descriptions such as "products" or "services" don’t differentiate your offering from any company in any industry. However, a descriptive heading that represents the type of products you sell, is relevant to both the search engines and your users.

And don't forget the most important step. Before you get started on a redesign, make sure you include both internal and external research. How your audience views your business is often different than an internal view. Merging both views will result in the best outcome.

The Single Most Important Aspect of Your Website

At work, a conference or a dinner party, we avoid that person that talks endlessly about themselves. There’s nothing worse than a “me oriented,” one way conversation.

Are you sending out similar signals online?

If your content is all about you. If it speaks to your capabilities but not customer benefits. If it doesn’t educate or instruct your audience, then they will avoid you just like you avoid “that person.”

Get Permission Not Sales
Today buyers develop their purchasing options online. With buyers more than 50% of a the way to a decision before they contact a seller, using online tools in the selling process is more important than ever. Rather than internally focused content, educate your audience and in the process, get permission.

Educational content helps your prospects learn something new or solve some problems they have. It parallels the role of an effective sales rep before the internet. They often helped educate users in ways that went far beyond the actual product they sold. Those interactions led to greater brand familiarity and understanding of your capabilities. It often allowed the sales rep to gain permission, to make another call, to learn more about their pain points, and maybe meet with a higher level decision maker.

Online or in person, buyers interact with you at different stages of the buying process. As decisions are formulated without your knowledge, website content is the vehicle that can connect and gain that permission. The permission to communicate through inbound visits to other useful web pages. Or outbound through your newsletter, downloading a white paper or attending a webinar. And like an effective sales rep, your content can provide valuable information that assists users regardless of the purchasing phase.

As your audience comes to value your website content, why wouldn't they think your capabilities are equally as valuable?

4 Reasons That Marketing Automation Will Increase Your Revenue

You’ve read the statistics, buyers are over 50% of the way to a purchasing decision before they contact a seller. Enterprise buyers conduct research on the web almost 90% of the time when they are formulating a purchasing decision.

As a result of this trend towards self education, there’s a need to support sales in ways that are different than the past. A need for an expanded role that's less "persuasion" and more "buyer education."

Successfully navigating these changes hinges on finding the right mix of inbound and outbound strategies, that connect the interactions of your audience. Because it's more difficult to identify prospects early in the purchasing cycle, it’s imperative to provide timely and relevant communications that help them narrow the field with you at the top of their list.

Marketing automation is one solution. It creates a digital infrastructure that allows marketing and sales to learn about, understand, and interact with buyers throughout the entire lifecycle – from attraction to conversion to retention – in a well-timed, personalized way. Marketing automation focuses on the definition, scheduling, segmentation, and tracking of marketing campaigns.

The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise be performed manually much more efficient, and makes new processes possible.

The best part is that marketing automation has proven to be highly successful at generating additional revenue.

• 78% of marketers cite marketing automation systems as most responsible for improving revenue contribution. (The Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups, Nov 2013)
• B2B marketers cite the #1 benefit of marketing automation as the ability to generate more and better leads. (Pepper Global, Sep 2013)
• B2B marketers who have successfully deployed lead nurturing programs average a 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured leads versus non-nurtured leads. (DemandGen, Aug 2013)
• B2B marketers who have implemented marketing automation contribute 10% more of the sales pipeline via marketing programs than do marketers who have not implemented marketing automation (44% versus 34%). (Forrester Research, Jan 2014)

Improving the experience and engagement of prospects and customers drives more demand for products and services, generates more high quality leads, and helps close more first-time and repeat sales. It’s a compelling value proposition.