What does your company stand for? Throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks doesn’t work anymore. Cheap tricks such as cute animations don’t add much value, but worse, distracts your key prospects from your primary message.
Your home page is not there to establish your brand. Rather, it’s to get visitors into your website where they can learn about your brand. It’s asking too much to think that one quick look at a home page will accomplish more than excellent navigation. That’s difficult enough and plenty for one page! It’s also not to sell me everything you are dying to sell me or to sell individual items.
No commercials please. No ego-building videos that amount to letting your audience know how smart you are. Instead, provide your visitor with a well- communicated small set of choices of where they can go to next. And keep it simple. People prefer easy navigation to complex website structure any day of the week.
Start with what your prospects and customers want to find or learn when they arrive at your home page. The better defined this is the better your chances of satisfying your guests’ experience. Did you know that approximately 85% of all search ends in frustration and only 1 of 20 people will search beyond the first search page? The reason is people can’t find what they are searching for. This places even more importance on delivering a website experience that is highly rewarding to your guests.
Providing unique distinctions is vital. An example is using multi-shots of your product, versus one static photograph over and over again. The objective is to make it visually interesting. This increases your ability to be persuasive where and when it matters. Small details like this can easily mean the difference between someone clicking for more or clicking away.
Here are five tips to keep in mind:
1) Harmonize your outbound marketing, search engine optimization and website pages with the same titles to reinforce your search results.
2) Present fewer, better-photographed visuals rather than too many on a page. Avoid amateur images. Also avoid stock images that have been used so many times people don’t even ‘see’ them anymore.
3) If you have tons of products break them into a few logical categories and branch categories for easy searching.
4) Present your products and services in a benefit framework your customer will appreciate.
5) Show your products and services later on. Don’t present too early in the communications process.
In order to mitigate your risk you need to establish a firm handshake between your customer and your company. In order to build brand equity, you need to build brand awareness based upon what will best meet your customers’ needs. The brand-building program is a process, not a one-time event, and one that can take years if not decades to fully accomplish.
