Marketing Services in Northern VA

I just received an email from a web design firm, touting a new client website that they just launched.

Frustrating experience. A perfect example of a web designer out-designing the site, upping the site’s “annoying” quotient. Every page of the website opens a new browser tab. Every page has a “read more” link that opens a new browser tab when clicked. When I closed the browser tab for the website, there were five additional tabs that required manual closing.

In designing the website in this way, the designer actually ensured that the more I read, the more aggravated I would become. In addition, the content I clicked to was top level filler. I learned no more about the company and their potential value to me than I had on the page before.

Dear Web designer: why are you trying to annoy your client’s customers? A little usability logic and testing go a long way towards making a website appealing, effective and sticky.

A client sent me a link to an article in Content Marketing Today called Shocking Headline Secrets from the New York Post. In a nutshell, there article tells us that when writing headlines for web content, “Be brief. Be complete. Be enticing.” If you have lots of strong headlines, visitors will stay on the site and read the content.

Being brief and being complete, especially when it comes to writing effective web content, is a tough balance to achieve. Even a quick scan of many websites confirms this.  More often than not, home page headlines are vague and uninteresting. They don’t grab even the most perfectly suited prospect.  To make matters worse, the content that follows is either more dense than a fruitcake or it’s just as unappetizing. (My apologies to fruitcake lovers, to me they make great doorstops.)

Finding the balance between too much and not enough can be tricky. Here are some tips for writing compelling website content:

1. Decide what are the 3 points are that you want to make on each page. Now boil it down to 2. To 1? Your #1 point should be conveyed in your header. The 2nd point in your first paragraph. The 3rd should fall below that as supporting information.

2. Ask yourself what problem your visitors want to solve. Make sure they understand how you can solve that problem. Tell them and make it crystal clear. The “what” and the “how.” Don’t leave out “why” they should care.

3. Remember. Your website is not about you. It’s about them: your customers, and those you hope will become customers.

Think that starting a business blog is not worth your time? Think again.

Following are some rather compelling stats on business blogs, courtesy of Hubspot:

• The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages
• HubSpot’s 2011 ROI Study shows that 69% of businesses attribute their lead generation success to blogging
• 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog
• The Nielsen Company shows that US internet users spend 3X more time on blogs and social networks than in email
• Inbound marketing, of which blogging is a crucial part, costs 62% less per lead than outbound marketing

If you work in a marketing department (or you are the marketing department) and want to make a strong case for starting a company blog, please share this post with your boss.

Soapbox Marketing writes blog posts. If you don’t have the time or inclination to write the blog yourself, but recognize the huge value that a blog can have on your business, then contact us at jsaunders@ soapboxmarketing.com