Designing a Website for Your Targeted Audience
When designing a website, many people tend to get caught up in the fun of trying different designs. It is important to remember that when you design a website, you are designing it for a particular audience. The fact is that the design you choose for your website should reflect your target audience. A website that does not relate to their audiences desires will not see an increase in sales.
When designing a website, the first thing you have to do is define your target audience. Websites are about communication; therefore, you have to determine who you are communicating to. For instance, will your audience consist mainly of men, women, a certain age group, a certain ethnicity…etc? You have to determine why they are coming to site and what they are looking for. Targeting a wide range of people may increase website traffic, but not sales.
You also have to think about the product. For instance, a man surfing the net will not be going to sites advertising womens make up. An elderly person will not go to a site selling acne medication. The idea is to attract shoppers who are looking for your specific product or service.
Once you have identified your target audience, you need to create the right look that will encourage them to make a purchase. This includes the appropriate graphics, advertising and promotional materials, and relevant content that they will find appealing. You also have to consider ease of navigation. If your audience is not that computer savvy, having an easy to navigate website will be beneficial.
Marketing techniques must be considered when designing a website. For instance, if you are selling wine, are you targeting experts in the wine industry or the general public? If you are targeting experts, you do not want to dumb down the site. Experts will have a wealth of technical knowledge regarding the wine industry and the wine itself, so you should present a marketing design that speaks on their level of expertise. Another example to consider is if you are selling a line of womens clothing. You have to design the website based on the type of women purchasing the clothes. For instance, are you selling casual wear, maternity clothes, or professional clothing for the office? Your website will deliver either a professional, relaxed, or family orientated design. Your content and advertising will need to centre on the type of environment the clothing will be worn in. All of these details will help you pick the most appropriate design.
Other design aspects you have to consider include: the most appropriate graphics and sounds, keywords that will reach your target audience, the type of information you will provide that is both relevant to the customer and the business philosophy. As well, you must consider the level of audience interaction that will be expected. This can include discussion forums, entering contests, completing surveys, providing feedback…etc.
Understanding your audience and their needs is essential to creating and maintaining a successful business website. It is important to remember that you may not get a perfect design on the first try. You will probably have to make some minor adjustments. The key point to remember is that your site should be built around your customer, and not your own personal preferences. As well, you may receive feedback from visitors regarding your website which will allow you to fine tune the design.
Designing a website with the customer needs and desires in mind is a critical part of running a successful business. Ultimately, whether one is designing a website for a business, or creating websites for their clients, the design of a website is blended with the business marketing concept.
Law PPC – Why Your Firm Hasn’t Been Successful
As a law firm or independent lawyer, determining where to spend you online marketing budget can be a daunting task. You have so many options, and are competing in a very competitive field. Each click could possibly be a new client eventually worth thousands or hundreds of thousands to the firm. With that kind of value on the line you can bet that firms are willing to pay whatever they have to, to be seen. Is there anything you can do to get the edge?
The simple answer is to be better than your competition. Of course gaining those skills can take a PPC marketer years and a lot of money to be able to compete. Most legal firms decide to do there PPC internally. Often times someone suggested they need to start marketing online and mentioned google and everyone came to the consensus of adsense. The trouble is it doesn’t work out to be so easy, and you are wasting your firms marketing budget. This might be a solution.
Would you recommend that a defendant represent himself in court? Why not? Because no matter how smart they are, law, and being effective in a court room is something that requires years of experience and specific knowledge to become good at. A physhics professor may be smarter than you, but he does not know how to object when a prosecutor makes an unsubstantiated claim.
What your firm should be doing is getting an expert in the field of PPC to manage the campaign for you. The reason is the same reason a PPC expert should hire a lawyer for law advice. PPC marketers spend years honing their skills to stay competitive. Most likely you are competing against them right now if you are advertising online, and you are at a huge disadvantage. Normally a good PPC management firm would charge 15% of your marketing budget + an hourly rate to do the the testing, tweaking, and research. This is not set in stone and is merely an industry average of sorts. Often times other arrangements are made.
A good PPC expert can more than make up for the 15% budget fee. This is because they know what keywords to target, and which ones not to. They also know how to get higher in the rankings without paying more. They also know how to attract only those customers that you want to click on the ads.
This means several things. First, you will improve the mother of all PPC metrics, cost per conversion. The means that your ratio of clicks to conversions will most likely improve, or your cost per click will lower meaning you will have a lower cost per conversion. Usually it is both. This is very good thing. Imagine you have a budget of $10000 per month, and you are currently getting 3000 clicks to your page. That means your are paying $3.33 per click. From that you are getting 100 leads. that is $100 per lead, or 3.3% conversion. If you could make that 6.6% you will have double the leads and your cost per lead is now $50.
That means that you can pay more for successful clicks, and possible even increase your advertising budget because it is so successful. Below are several of the most important factors that effect PPC campaigns. If you are outsourcing to a firm or specialist, they should know these facts inside and out.
Optimizing your landing pages for the keywords you are targeting is extremely important. If you are targeting clients for emergency room malpractice, you want to point them to a page on your site specifically about malpractice law and not your main page. The more specific and relevant you can get the page the better.
Success is all about the testing. Few campaigns are profitable right out of the gate. The key is test every variable. Test dozens of ad variations, test small groups of keywords individually. Keep the best performer through out the others, and test the best performer against a new set of ads.
Analytics makes or breaks the campaign. You cant test properly without a solid analytics program. Without great analytics you cannot tell which words are converting to the desired result, and which ones are eating you budget.
Keyword research is how you determine which keywords to target in the first place. If you do proper keyword research before you even begin an internet marketing campaign, your success rate compared to not doing the research will be astronomical. It is the foundation of all internet marketing.
Get More Traffic By Utilising Keyword Links
Keyword links will get traffic. Adobe currently beats 1.4 billion results to get to number one for what keyword phrase? click here, probably the most common keyword link in existence. And this simply happened because most websites that have an Adobe download link make it click here. Whether they get traffic with this search is debatable, but the point is made.
So what exactly is a keyword link? A keyword link is a focussed back link, a link that points to your site. But its a super back link. A keyword link not only gives your site a back link, but also tells the search engines that your site is the authority on that keyword phrase. In short Google loves keyword links. And you want Google to love you.
So are you using keyword links to get traffic to your site? You should, because its actually quite easy to use keyword links to your great advantage. Your forum signatures should have keyword back licks. And your article resource boxes should definitely have keyword links in them. Youre not doing any extra work, but youre getting much higher quality back links.
And its so easy to get the right keywords for your keyword links. The major search engines, including Google, have a keyword research tool that will show you how many searches were done on a whole family of a particular keyword or keyword phrase. Have a look at a specific keyword and its family and choose a brother or sister keyword that is typical of your site, but not to widely used.
Heres an example: you have a website that mentors people on how to get traffic to their sites. They best keyword link would be something like get traffic or instantly get traffic or get traffic here. So in your recourse box you would have: We teach big traffic secrets! Click here, get traffic now. In this case get traffic now would be your keyword link and not click here. Competing with Adobe on a silly phase like that really is futile.
When you start promoting a new website its best to stick to only a couple of keyword links. Work with then until you get traffic and authority status. If you spread out your efforts to thinly across the web it will only take longer to get traffic and search engine results. And its always better to get traffic now, rather then later.
Learn How Establishing An E-Commerce Website Can Speed Up Your Sales!
Do you currently own your own retail business? Is your business a brick-and-mortar business and you aren’t yet convinced this ‘e-Commerce Website Development’ trend is the way to go for your business? Since its inception in the 1970s and complete social and governmental acceptance in the late 1990s, implementing e-Commerce website development to your existing retail business can benefit as an additional revenue generator. In fact, implementing e-Commerce website development to your existing retail business can benefit as an additional revenue steam in addition to helping you move closeout, unwanted and unsold merchandise.
At this point in time it is hard to even imagine a world without E-Commerce. The way it has revolutionalized how we do business is something worth celebrating. In this era of now-a-days that can simply be described as social, e-commerce has created convenience that cannot be matched.
Basically, you need an online presence and typically this means through e-Commerce web site development. Keep in mind, your web site acts as your online ‘store front’ for your image and the goods and/or services you are attempting to market and sell online. Consumers are browsers. Consumers spend hours researching and browsing online before they make their purchase. Be sure your online store front converts these browsers into buyers.
Many smaller businesses are anxious about supporting online payments and transactions. You really can’t ask a consumer to mail you a check or money order these days. Bottom line is you just need to become comfortable with online payment processing and transactions because you will miss a great amount of sales and revenue if you opt not to offer this.
Don’t be so concerned about fancy graphics, videos and music. The average consumer doesn’t wait for these things to download. If you do post images of your products make sure they’re optimized for rapid download. Consumers have short attention spans; they will not wait more than seconds for an image to download without moving on. Furthermore, the more text-rich your e-Commerce website development is, the more search engine optimization you will achieve. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and/or quality of traffic to your web site with the use of keywords that are picked up from search engine search inquiries.
Site navigation is very important as well. Simple site navigation recommendations such as left-side search bar, drop down menus, easy to use links, FAQ section and relevant menu bars are all important. Relevant and recommended pages to link to are “About Us”, “FAQs”, “Contact Us”; and “Privacy Policy”. The obvious pages apart from these listed would be your products and/or services. If your product is clothes, break the menu links down to women, men, children, and current sales. If your product is tires, break the menu down into categories of tires that the tire consumer would use.
Top 10 Reasons To Have An E-Commerce Site
Most people have opted to go to the internet to make a living and others have made millions from it. But the secret to this kind of success is not easy to come by. The first thing that you should do is to have an eCommerce site that sells. If you cannot sell your products and services online to the internet folk you cannot succeed in driving the revenue that you require. It’s that simple. If you are unconvinced by why you need a website that works then perhaps these reasons will give you a clearer picture.
1. An e-consulting site will reach out to millions of people. It creates a virtual presence of you and your company and with enough effort you could start making money in no time. It is one of those marketing tools that have proved to be tremendously successful with time.
2. It eases the process of you reaching the masses that you want. In the physical there is little you can do but in a world where one place becomes a meeting place for hundreds of people, it becomes easier for you.
3. Reduce processing costs by $25 to $75 for each paperless order. E-Commerce consulting firms had determined that the average amount saved per transaction when making the change from brick-and-mortar to online and paperless, is between $25.00 and $75.00.
4. Reduce collaboration costs. Collaboration costs are costs associated with doing business. Employees, pens, paper, printers, faxing, heating, cooling, bottled water, phone systems and so many other collaboration costs will be saved once you establish your e-commerce site.
5. Efficiency must be the main objective for any business entity, as it determines the load of work one can offer to the customers and how fast the work is done. All these can be assured when one has an e-commerce site as it is fast in processing any kind of transactions in minutes rather than in the hours in the life. This in the long run adds to ones revenue stream as transactions take less time.
6. By encouraging transactions through your web site, you will obtain and be able to save all your customers’ information electronically, thus making it easier to reuse and analyze for target demographic purposes. You can send out reminder emails for upcoming sales, you can send out special service offers, you can email coupons but mainly you will be able to keep in touch with these customers and remind them of your business often.
7. Savings are improved by up to 10% when the activity of purchasing goods and services is done indirectly
8. The internet allows you to target a huge customer base. A brick-and-mortar store only allows you to target customers in the immediate area and assumes people have time to visit your business. Consumers are browsing, researching and shopping online 24 hours every day.
9. Transactions that are done online need no paper and are cheaper to carry out. This of course means you get to save, no matter how little the expense might have been. It is still saving nonetheless.
10. Sales online completely eliminate paper processing, printing and in some cases, shipping.
All in all it can be agreed that the internet has done so much to improve our lives and tapping into this goldmine will give you an advantage. That is why having an e-commerce consulting website is so important if you want to make any real profits.
