Make Your Website More Persuasive
Making your website more persuasive can be achieved when you focus on the main goal of your website. Here are a couple of key questions that one should keep in mind: What are we selling? What message are we sending? How can we be the solution? How does our solution benefit our target audience? By addressing these questions you will be able to construct a persuasive message.
Who Is Your Target Market?
Knowing the audience to whom you are selling your product or services is very important. This will make your selling point extremely successful. Ask yourself, “Should I aim for quantity or quality? Am I speaking to an individualistic mentality or is it a collectivist mentality?” Individualism thinking is when you care about how it affects the person themselves.
How can your product or service impact them? This is different from collectivism thinking, which focuses more on the bigger picture. For instance, how is this going to benefit them as a group, team, community, or even their family?
Moreover, you’ll want to know the demographics of your customers. Income level, single or married, children or no children, location, gender, interest, and etc. Who is your ideal customer? As you will see in the next section researching your type of audience is key to having a more persuasive website.
What Is Your Message
The message that you send to the targeted audience is the next quest. So having more than one message and several different approaches are important because there will always be more than one audience type. I often see customers try to sell all of their services under one web page instead of creating one dedicated web page per category.
For example, let’s say you have an auto mechanic shop and you have a web page named “Services” and on that page, you list tire service, engine repair, oil change, and brake repair service. The problem with this is that it’s too much information under one web page. Therefore, Google and other search engines will not rank you on the first page because it is too vague.
The better option would be to create separate dedicated web pages that talk about a specific category. Similar to what we did here with RJ Automotive website. If you look at their web page, you will notice that under services each category has its own dedicated web page.
This means that if you have a brake problem, then you will get the information you need on that brake problem on that web page without having to weed out all of the information that is not relevant to your problem.
Once you have categorized all of your services on your website, then you will want to take advice from the famous philosopher Aristotle by applying pathos and logos. By using pathos, you are using the emotional appeal that will target people with a high sense of value, integrity, and respect — people who want to know how this will benefit them personally.
For this approach, you can start by saying something like “Imagine what it would be like to ______” and then show an illustration that depicts the positive results of purchasing your product or service. You can also show a picture of the consequences of not buying your product or service.
When using logos you are using the logical approach. This approach focuses on what their concern is, how I am going to benefit from this, and is it going to help me make money or succeed in my business.
Finding out what type of people you are talking to works best in my point of view. When people are focused on what you are saying, you can slow down and concentrate on what message you are trying to get across.
This means less is more; the quality of information is going to make the difference. If your audience can’t focus on your message, then you will lose them.
I always laugh when I see billboards on the freeway that have way too much information because people simply don’t have the time to read them. The same applies to your website. If you have a banner or slideshow on your website then it needs to be clear and to the point, because you only have one to two seconds.
If your audience wants to learn more about your proposition, then there should be a call to action button like “Apply Now” or “Get Started Today!” or something to that effect. Moreover, people respond better when they feel a sense of connection.
Another form of sending a message would be to bring up problems that could be an issue for them. This brings us the question of how I can solve your problem.
How can we be your solution?
One of my mentors used to say, “We get paid to solve people’s problems.” The more I thought about this, the more I realized it applied to my life every time I made a purchase.
It is important that we open up those questions. But make sure that you have put in the time to research what you are marketing and that you are prepared for foreseeable problems and solutions.
This will put you in advantage to direct the conversation as if you are a hero. You might even just start off your marketing effort with “Are you having these problems?” and then state that you can resolve them. Be sure that you come across as “The Problem Solver”. This gives the audience a sense of confidence in giving their time to listen to what is being offered.
Being specific, setting a vision, or a resolution is helpful in opening up their perspective to view in a different set of eyes that are not ready to shut you down.
How our solutions benefit them?
Building trust towards the audience is mutually beneficial for both the audience and the marketing effort.
People want to interact with people they trust and have similarities with. When you are offering solutions you get to know where they live, what they like, and what inspires them. This will give you and the audience a sense of connection that will allow them to receive your message without resistance.
People like to feel as if they have made a good choice.
The audience always wants to know that they can trust you and that you can get things done. Most importantly assure them that your customers are important to you. I always recommend that you get your clients to write reviews on Google local listings, Yelp local listings, or Facebook. For example, on this website you can see that the reviews are being sourced; therefore, it gives the review more authenticity.
The other benefit of doing this is that you create social proof. In other words, if all of these people can highly recommend this business, then they must have good service. In fact, according to Yext.com, a leading online directory service says that even a one-star increase in your reviews can increase your revenue by 9%.
Are you ready to start converting more of your existing visitors into paying clients? Knowing something is half the battle, but taking action on what you learned to make all the difference. What action will you take to help your website become more persuasive? If you don’t have the time or prefer to have an expert marketing agency like us help you, then please reach out to us today at 559-553-5000.
www.chavezwebdesign.com
Written by Noemi Chavez
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