So you have a website! Well done, but have you been struggling to get leads or make sales. The key reason is that you may not have set goals that you wish your website would achieve.

As with any project it is imperative to analyze its purpose, the same would apply to building a website. Today we are having a look at how to determine goals for your website and successfully convert leads into sales.

There are two categories you need to look at when defining your website goals:

• Immediate goals: What are the immediate (short term) goals of the project? E.g. Increasing sales for an upcoming holiday or the promotion of a new product.
• Long Term Goals: What are the long term goals of the project? E.g. Increasing annual sales or expanding brand recognition

When you have a website it is important to understand how internet users / clients will find information about your products. Today, search engines have become the supreme source of product information. Ask yourself the question – where do you stand in the search engines? The websites positioned at the top are going to be far more successful than the rest of the websites featured on the bottom of the page. It´s time to start thinking about getting your name up there and to be more visible for the client interested in your product or service.

The main goal of any website should be to provide its visitors with a pleasant and fulfilling experience. To have a user friendly website and visitors that have positive experiences on your website will be drawn to visit your website again, tell friends about your website, sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product, submit an inquiry about a service, etc.

To help achieve these goals you need to create focused landing pages. According to Wikipedia, in online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

A client generally does not have time to spend reading through a website’s home page looking for the product. Only ONE click and the client will reach the correct page.

In short, to be visible for a potential client and to convert leads into sales, set your goals and create landing pages.

So you have built a website but have you given any thought as to how functional your website is when it comes to changing content and updating products? It is imperative in an ever changing environment to be ready to change your websites content to reflect what is happening in the world such as holidays and sporting events or to simply update product information. There are three aspects you should be mindful of when building a website, they are as follows:

Content
Your website should be easily changeable to keep your content fresh – which will in turn give you a higher page rank and inspire your visitors to visit your website again.

The best way to achieve this is by building your website in a CMS (Content Management System). Having a database driven website makes it easy to update information and to implement functionality with extensions e.g. a photo gallery.

By using most content management systems you can display the latest content on the front page automatically this will keep your homepage looking fresh.

Products
If you have a large array of products the best way to publish them is by building your product website in an e-commerce system. An e-commerce system lets you quickly and easily update product information such as prices, descriptions etc. Usually featuring specific products or latest products can be done with a few clicks of the mouse via the administration.

You can also integrate some e-commerce systems with content management systems which will provide a solution for both easily managing content and publishing products.

Look & Feel
Changing the look of your website can easily be done by first developing your website using external style sheets then changing the look by editing the style sheets. When using global style sheets you are able to change the entire website instead of a single page.

Content Management Systems are usually template driven, this allows you to create different looks for your website and choose between them via an administrator panel.

If your website is easy to modify it can save you a lot of time so giving you more time to spend on other aspects of your business.

So something happened or certain events are taking place and you have determined that you have a product or service that furfills the need that it generates. How do you go about marketing your products to these people at that moment.

One thing that is important is to determine who your target market is.. Will it be existing clients that you will advertise a new product or service to or will it be new clients that you want to sell your product to? You will definitely use two different marketing strategies for these different groups.

Using a more direct marketing approach for existing customers should perform the best, as they are already familiar with your brand. If you are delivering a good product or service they will be interested in new things that you might offer them. You can make use of email or SMS marketing to drive them to your website to promote these specific products.

To gain new clients you must make sure you are being found when people are searching for you. Future clients might not know your brand but they have a need for what you offer. If you are in their face when they are searching for your product and you make it easy for them to get hold of you, you will reap the rewards. Make sure you have PPC campaigns running on all major search engines for relevant keywords to maximise your exposure.

Make sure that the content on your website is ready to cater for these potential new clients.  Setting up focussed landing pages for the specific products will be necessary to make the marketing more relevant.

People will always have certain needs, sometimes in the event of a crisis or certain situations the need increases drastically. If you can see the need and act on it quickly, you will achieve great results.

You might be thinking what am I going on about? Most of us are not very observant people when it comes to changes in the environment around us. I know you are thinking but I’m really observant. I really thought this of myself but I have started noticing how many opportunities are passing me by without even noticing it. I now know there are treasures that pass us by every now and then that could have really equated to some great sales or leads at the very least.

In South Africa the national energy supplier Eskom recently increased their prices on electricity by 24.8%. Now many of us would be utterly disgusted by this increase and not even noticed the potential treasure that lies in this situation. If you are a supplier of any renewable energy sources then you should be blowing your trombone as loud as you can. You need to inform worried people of small things that might convince them to buy your products. Did you for instance know that 43% of your home’s energy usage is from water heating. This means that you could in the long run cut your energy bills by 43% by simply installing solar water heaters.

So what should renewable energy suppliers be doing at the moment?? They should be shouting from the rooftops so everybody can hear that their product could save them up to 43% on their energy bills in the long run. Is this happening? The short answer is no. Companies struggle to react quickly to changes such as these and this means that they miss the wave. That point where the need for a product or service is create by what’s going on in the world.

One of the things your company will need is to be proactive, you need to encourage your employees to identify situations like these and use them to your benefit. Secondly your company needs to ensure that they are able to react quickly to change by updating things like your website and pay per click advertising that you might be running. During the course of this week we will have another blog post that will provide you with some tips to help ensure your company can adapt quickly when the need arises.

Now identifying the treasure trove is only the first part. You need to find visitors to show your message to. You need to ensure that you plan out your marketing strategy so your unique selling point will be put across to the right audience. You need to drive traffic using all forms of advertising that your company can afford. Online definitely still is the most effective and because of this I would suggest you start here. If you play your cards right you could even co-brand your product as the solution to a certain need. An example of where this has happened (and the only one I can now think of the top of my head) is Google. Google came into the market as a solution to the need people had. Google offered them a really quick simple and accurate tool to find what they are looking for. To Google something has now even also become a verb. This is exposure that you can’t buy for your brand.

You will also need to look at optimizing your landing pages so that your visitor land on pages that closely resembles solution to the need they have. By making sure you tailor this as close as possible, you will have far more visitors converting and performing desired actions.

Lastly you will need to ensure you make a habit of thinking about how you can identify these hidden treasures. Our theme this week is on how to identify treasures like these and react to them to ensure you get the most out of these situations. So please check in the next few days.