An organization should not use its website simply as a placeholder.

Your website is a point of contact for important stakeholders and a marketing tool.

Your website should work to achieve specific marketing objectives.

The Goals

If you’re a business, your website should have a combination of the following three goals.

Make a Sale:

This is your goal if the nature of your product allows it to be sold directly online.

This is usually the case if it can be easily transferred online (for examples, digital products) and the purchase decision is small enough to be made without a phone conversation or face-to-face meeting.

Get Information:

This applies to all businesses. You want the contact information of your customers. You want leads.

Ever wonder why so many sites want you to register as a user? Or why many businesses have free newsletters? Or why companies offer demo accounts? Or why some companies offer to send you free material?

A major reason that they do all of this is to get information (most importantly contact information) on potential customers.

Establish A Relationship:

Trust is a big part of selling. People want to buy from businesses that they know and trust.

A great way to form that type of relationship is to become a resource.

You want your customers to see you as a resource that can help their business.

This often means giving away free and useful information. It also means the willingness to talk to people about your industry without trying to make a sale all the time.

At Faithadnet, we welcome you to contact us at marketing@faithadnet.com for general questions regarding online marketing and the faith and family audience.

Accomplishing the Goals

To accomplish any of the goals above, you need people to come to your website. Once they do come, you need to provide them with compelling content.

Search Engine:

First, achieve high ranking on search engines. The rule for SEO is top 10 (some say 30) or nothing. You would rather rank high for a specific phrase than lower for a more general one.

Use tagging and linking to achieve high ranking.

Second, what shows up on the search engine results page(SERP) should draw people to your website. Treat your appearance the SERP as an ad.

A search engine usually displays three things on the SERP.

It displays your URL. Ideally, you should have an appealing URL that relates to your product.

It displays your page title. The page title should sell. Some people make the mistake of simply putting the name of the organization as the title. Unfortunately, the phrase “Your Company Inc.” rarely sells.

Keep your title to 70 characters with spaces or less. Otherwise Google will not display your whole title.

It also displays some sort of description. If your meta description roughly matches what the user googles, Google will display that as the description.

You want to make the meta description sell as well. It’s the same concept as the title, but for meta description, you are allowed a maximum of about 155 characters with spaces.

Content:

There is no cookie-cutter approach to developing content that accomplish your goals. Diverse goals, products, and audiences demand diverse types of content.

As a marketing director, your job is to decide upon a combination of goals and develop content that drives toward those goals.

Your content should be compelling to your audience. As a general rule, focus on your customers more than you. And focus more on benefits than attribute.

For example, the company Mattress Inc. sells very comfortable memory foam mattresses.

“You” and “Attribute” content is:

“We have fancy memory foam mattresses that molds itself to the shape of the human body.”

Most customers could care less.

“Customer” and “Benefit” content is:

“If you sleep on our mattress, you will not have insomnia or back pains.”

The benefit should be as personal as possible. The more the customer cares, the better.

If you’re selling to businesses, the benefits that really hit home are increasing revenue, decreasing costs, and saving time and energy.

So an even better statement is:

“With a full night’s peaceful rest, you will have plenty of energy to face the coming day. And with your back pain gone, you will also be able to enjoy life more.”

Details and supporting facts are also better than general claims.

“You will sleep well on our mattress” or even “Our mattress is the most comfortable ever” are very general claims.

A more specific claim is:

“95% of our customers are able to sleep at least 3 hours more. Of those who suffer from back pains, 80% of them report immediate improvement. We won Mattress of the Year from Mattress Magazine and we are the exclusive supplier of mattresses to the White House.”

The above statement will work a lot better.

You want compelling content, but you must also manage customer expectations. You should only promise what you can deliver with reasonable certainty.

That‘s why at Faithadnet, as much as we would like to promise revenue, we cannot do that because revenue is partly beyond our control.

Instead, we choose to focus on what we can deliver – access to over 20 million users from the faith and family audience.

Final Words

Your website is an important contact point for customers and it should sell.

The selling begins on the SERP and continues with the content of your webpage.

For all your marketing efforts (including banner and keyword advertising), make sure to keep everything customer and benefit oriented and support your claims with detailed facts.

For questions and comments regarding this article, online advertising, the Faith & Family audience, or Faithadnet, do not hesitate to contact us at marketing@faithadnet.com.