Regularly reviewing your website to ensure it’s updated and the content is still relevant is a good business practice, but if you’re not promoting yourself no one will get to see the result! This is why it’s also important to review how you are marketing your website. Things move quickly, especially online, so regular reviews will ensure you are keeping your digital marketing up to date and ahead of any competitors.
One key area is to ensure you are using your website address (URL) clearly across all of your marketing. This is to encourage people who engage with your messages to connect and find out more. The users that do click through are usually the ones who are interested in your message and should be looked after to maximise the number that continues down the ‘sales funnel’.
We can do this by making the calls to action (CTA) clear at all stages of the process and reinforce to users that they’re in the right place, this is especially true of larger or complex websites where users can easily feel a little lost. Clear CTA lets users know what to do next. These can be in the form of clear buttons with ‘click here’, ‘find out more’, ‘contact us’ and so on, but they can also be links to your website so users know where they are going to land.
Here are some examples:
Taking Simpsons Creative as an example, if we had an advert selling our email marketing services, we could link users to simpsonscreative.co.uk/digital/email-marketing this makes it clear to them that they will end up on the email marketing page if they click on the link.
“People are more willing to click on clear and trustworthy links.”
“Custom Domains Drive up to a 34% increase in CTR”
Showing a clear CTA is part of the process, as it reassures users they are in the right place once they have clicked on the link. It also plays a large part in building the trust and encouraging engagement. We can do this by ensuring consistent branding across all marketing activities. Logos, contact details, headlines and imagery should all play a part.
For example, using the same feature image across all marketing will visually reassure users they are in the right place. It is crucial to keep consistent branding across all marketing materials.
Social Media
Your website and social media platforms sit at the heart of your digital marketing. Encourage your users on social media to visit your website find out more about your products and/or services. It’s important you provide content that will attract people to your profile and increase engagement.
To keep your audience engaged, you need to provide them with content that they can relate to. Think about what you have to offer and why might your audience be following you in the first place. For example, if you own your own cake business show off your cakes. They will be visually pleasing but also allow potential customers to see the standard of your work. Share a recipe on a blog that your audience can follow along with at home. Create a poll and ask your audience which colour icing they prefer, what cake flavour is their favourite. If you have something to offer that your audience can relate to, they will engage.
By sharing your recipe blog on social media, you are directly linking them back to your website. This will increase traffic on your website and give them a chance to explore further pages.
Emailers
It is easy to get distracted by headlines, imagery and copy when creating emailers, these are all vital to the project, but you should not forget your calls to action. Having the best eye-catching design is no good without strong calls to action to encourage users to continue down the sales funnel.
Take a step back and consider what you’re trying to achieve with the mailer, do you want them to contact you, to read a blog, to follow you on socials or to find out more about a product or service? The answer to this question will help guide your CTA selection and where on your website it will direct users to, nothing is stopping you from having several but it’s a balance as the more you have, the less weight/importance each will have for readers.
A newsletter-style emailer with links through to multiple posts can have a CTA for each featured story, this way readers who are interested in a particular story will have a clear way to continue. A product announcement emailer, however, would be better off with a single focused CTA directing users through to the highlighted product.
Email Signatures
Your email signature is included in every one of your emails, or should be at least, this means it’s constantly being put out in front of your clients and contacts. So it’s important your signature looks professional and provides contacts with key information, one of which should be your website address.
Keep your contact details clear and your overall signature simple, it needs to get across your details quickly and unobtrusively – remember it’s going to be included on all emails that you send. Contacts won’t thank you if your signature takes up half of your email thread, you can draw more attention to it by using different font, capital letters or contrasting colour. When you have checked it is in place send yourself a test email and test that all of the links work as intended and take users through to your website without any issues.
Printed Material
It is important not to forget about your printed marketing material, some industries still use this heavily and it can still play a large part of your overall marketing. Reviewing it to ensure it’s still relevant and ‘on brand’ is key. Part of this process should involve reviewing how it interacts with your digital strategy, do they provide users with website links to continue their experience? Have you made this transition as easy as possible? Looking at these questions alongside the rest of your marketing will help improve the performance of your printed material and help to funnel users to additional material, while all along pushing them towards your ultimate goal of getting in touch or purchasing a product/service.
Clear and easy to use links to your website will help users with this transition, links to your home page should be clearly visible on all material. With more complex documents, such as reports or catalogues, you may need to include links to additional information or supporting documents, these links should be kept as clear and possible.
You could tackle this with a link shortener if the link is very long, or you may create a landing page for your document that contains all of the links in one easy to use page, another option would be to look at using QR codes alongside links.
If you’re providing the document in digital format as well, a clear link in the printed version can also help users. This is especially true of large reports or catalogues that can be cumbersome to carry around.
All of these options are looking at making it as easy as possible for users to interact with these links and remove frustrations of having to type out URL’s.
Website Health Check Guide
This is part of our Website Health Check guide, the full version with all 10 sections is available to download for free now.
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