Web design; 5 great ways to optimise your site for advert conversions

So, you’ve got website traffic and products/services to sell. Now you need make sure you follow these 5 ways to convert visitors too potential customers…

Introduction

Successful adverts grab the attention of the audience, provide them with compelling, useful and memorable information, and drive them towards completing a powerful call to action; whether this be buying a product, signing up to a service, donating to a charity fundraiser, or simply learning more about an offering.

Given the instant, condensed nature of online advertising, it is not often possible to achieve all of these objectives within one short advert.

Instead, digital adverts, especially those to cold audiences, will focus on grabbing the attention of the audience, before driving them towards another source, that will do the heavy lifting with regard to the providing information stage.

This is where web design comes into play.

Most digital marketing campaigns will rely upon web content at least once in the customer journey.
This could be in the spreading information stage, providing social proof through reviews and product demonstrations, or in capturing the important customer action of purchasing, donating or signing up.

Whatever you need your website for in your digital campaigns, these simple steps will ensure that your website is optimised to drive conversions for your adverts!

1. Have a clear understanding of your customer journey

The first stage to creating a successful marketing campaign is to ensure you have a sophisticated understanding of your desired customers, and how you want them to progress from being unaware of your offering, toward being a valuable customer. This is to say, you need to understand the customer journey. The easier you make it to progress along this customer journey, the more people will do it.

To map out the expected customer journey, use the AIDA method;

• How are you going to grab their Attention
• What methods will you use to turn this into Interest
• Once you have their interest, how are you going to make them Desire your offering
• Now they want it, what Action do you want them to take?

Once you have a clear understanding of the journey you want your desired customers to take, start to map out what content is needed, and which medium will be used to deliver each bit of content.

Often, your website will be expected to perform multiple roles in this process. A ‘one-stop-shop’ approach for web content doesn’t often work for web visitors who are at different stages of the customer journey.

2. Use advert specific landing pages

To follow the AIDA process, it is vital to segment your audience at every stage, and to provide unique information to each audience accordingly.
If you are creating a succession of adverts that target a different stage of the sales process, it would be a mistake to send all of this traffic to the same page, such as your home page.

Instead, you want to create advert specific landing pages. The website experience should be tailored to each unique stage of the customer journey, so that you can provide a targeted message that matches that specific audience. This website experience should focus upon the headers, content, and importantly; the calls to action.

Early on, you will want to make clear the key features of the offering, before delving into why the customer would want it.

From there, displaying social proof through reviews and demonstrations is a tried and trusted method at converting interest into desire.

Finally, to your warm audience, you want to make it as simple as possible to undertake the powerful action that you had planned for them to take, such as signing up, subscribing, purchasing or donating.

3. Ensure your Retargeting tools are set up to measure the important actions

If you are devoting your time and effort to creating a sophisticated ad campaign based on an expected customer journey, then you need to ensure that you can track the audiences at every stage.

By adding a retargeting tool to your website, such as the Facebook Pixel or LinkedIn InsightTag, you can create a live audience to advertise to. This audience will be populated with visitors to specific pages, or to visitors who undertook a certain action like clicking a button or watching a video. This is one of the benefits of using advert specific landing pages.

A word of caution; adding the retargeting tools to Forms with Calls to Action such as ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Contact Us’ can often lead to misleading results that are higher than you would expect. To accurately track form conversions, don’t place the retargeting tool on the button that opens the form, or even submits the form. Instead, place the retargeting tool on the destination page that you would go to once you had entered the form. This will ensure that you can track those who have fully filled out the form, rather than those who have just opened it.

4. Consistent on brand messaging throughout

Having a clear customer value proposition throughout your adverts and landing pages will boost conversions as your audience will have a strong understanding of what you are offering and how this benefits them.

If your initial advert is waxing lyrical about the quality of the product, yet your landing page is extolling the cheap price, this muddled message will confuse your audience, weakening your attempts at building awareness.

Having concise, consistent positioning and proposition statements throughout your website will keep your message simple, so that your audience are fully aware of why they should want your offering. Surprising your audience is rarely a useful tool in building the necessary trust that leads to sales and sign-ups.

5. Ensure your website is quick to load, and functions as expected

Marketing is tough. Whether it be crafting engaging copy, creating exciting visuals, concocting powerful calls to actions; it is a delicate process.

Once you have perfected your advert offering, the last thing you want to do is endanger your conversion through a slow, dysfunctional and confusing website that annoys your audience.

There are many ways you can improve your website efficiency and speed. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool to find out specific suggestions for your website.

Conclusion

Your website is the cornerstone to your online presence. Before spending a penny on online advertising, it is vital to ensure your website will be a valuable asset in converting interested visitors into valuable customers. For general tips about how to get more enquiries through your website, have a browse of https://www.madesimplemedia.co.uk/blog/6-ways-to-get-
more-enquiries-through-your-website