Using Your Website To Create Urgency For Sales
At Classic City, we believe your website should serve as your brand’s marketing hub. What exactly do we mean by that? When we work with clients, we seek out every angle of their business that can be tied to their website and then conduct the connections their teams need through custom design, strategic content, and an efficient WordPress back end. In our series on turning your website into a marketing hub, we’ll begin with everyone’s first step: creating urgency. For our purposes here, we will assume our KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to be sales-focused. So, while the following fundamentals of website design are consistent across verticals, the examples offered here will best serve businesses with a product.
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We also work extensively with mission-based organizations like churches, non-profits, and B-Corps with unique purposes, so we’d love to hear from you directly if your needs are unaddressed below.
Let’s think about your website as a dynamic tool rather than an antiquated marketing brochure. A standard “brochure website” has little to no calls-to-action (CTA’s) for its visitors. While it may actually do a great job at explaining what a brand offers and encourage contact, the means of getting in touch require additional steps that disrupt the buyer journey. In a hyper-competitive online marketplace, every disruption is a reason for a prospective customer or client to do business elsewhere. Keeping this in mind, we encourage you to design your website’s user experience to secure its own traffic and catch users “bouncing” from competitors.
Assuming you’re making the most of the tools at your disposal, your website should be your best tool for capturing revenue. The tactics for doing so are rather obvious: If you market a product to consumers (B2C), you should have an online store. If your sales process targets businesses (B2B), you should have actionable steps available that address your prospects’ most immediate pain points. Well-designed websites create opportunities for action rather than merely informing their audiences of what opportunities may exist.
You’ll find some tips below about how your development, design, and content teams can work together to create a cohesive marketing website that creates and encourages efficient action. Need a partner? We’re here.
Creating urgency through thoughtful development
Fast, easy to use features so that actions can be taken quickly
Page speed has several implications in SEO algorithms, which is because it’s a huge factor in your website’s user experience. People are impatient and move quickly. Unless they already want to work with you by the time they’re visiting your site, you’re one option of many. Waiting too long to start the purchase process (even due to a slowly loading eCommerce platform) can deter people who aren’t fully committed to any particular brand.
Triggering on-page events
The page data collected from users on your website can be used to create opportunities to close a potential deal right away before your audience has time to do more research on the options available to them. For example, activating a pop-up window after a certain amount of time or scroll percentage to push your audience toward a purchasing decision. In today’s marketplace, it’s probable that you have not monopolized your vertical–that’s okay when you can convince your prospects that buying your product/service is in their best interest and can be done right away.
Strong CRM connection for follow-up
Making sure that all potential leads come through your sales pipeline with the necessary metadata and information to strategically close these deals. Creating forms that capture the right information at the right junctures will improve the resources available to your sales team and result in better conversion rates.
Creating urgency through careful design
Intuitive UI/UX
Users should not have to think about how your website works. The menu should be easily accessible whether on desktop or mobile, the site map should be simple to navigate, and most importantly, your landing pages should satisfy searcher intent. Think about how your website is actually used rather than what it does. For example, if you know most of your users are visiting on mobile devices then a standard desktop-first site may not be effective, especially if your design incorporates a lot of video and/or animation.
Encouraging use of color
The 99designs.com blog is a great place to turn for design fundamentals. Their guide on color that gives plenty of reason to be thoughtful, here. Templated color schemes are generally pleasing to the eye, but they are generic (thus their versatility in the right context) and limit your audience’s ability to get to know you and what values you represent. Using the same brand colors for specific elements creates cohesion and helps guide your site traffic to your desired ends.
Design page layouts that highlight important CTA’s
Simply put, hiding actionable steps in the cobwebbed corners of your website isn’t good for anybody. When you introduce an opportunity, your users should be able to immediately act on the impulse you’ve created–otherwise it may disappear.
Creating urgency with persuasive content:
Search Engine Journal is an excellent resource for SEO tips and best practices. A few critical areas to pay close attention to when thinking about urgency:
Target specific customer needs
It can be easy to throw a bunch of popular keyword strings into your copy and hope to cast a broad enough net to acquire the business you need in order to hit sales metrics. However, understanding searcher intent and what it implies about your ideal customer. Focus on how you can speak to them, rather than at them (and everyone else, whether they care or not!)
Remove buyer objections
We’ll get into establishing authority and trust in a later piece, however understanding why someone would push back against making a purchase is a critical part of any sales funnel. When done well, your words will make a decision easier and build trust that you know what you’re talking about when you advertise products and services to them.
Give your audience a timeframe and incentive to act right away
Your marketing team can decide what restrictions make the most sense for your product, but the general idea is that your words identify a cost for any delay–offering free shipping in the next 2 hours, or running an intro special for new clients, etc. Small amounts of pressure go a long way in taking someone from the research phase into the decision-making phase of their own buying journey.
Chris LaFay