How to turn your website into a 24/7 sales person
How to turn your website into a 24/7 sales person
If you have a small business website, you have in your hands a fantastic tool that you can use to
Offer value & insights to your potential customers on a massive scale
Attract more potential customers into your business and
Gather more information from warm leads who may turn into customers in the future, with some nurturing from you along the way. (hello email newsletters)
Now, you might be looking at that lovely list thinking, ‘well, I can’t do any of that with my website’, then you my friend do not have a website.
You have a problem.
I hear it all the time - small business owners spend a fortune on a website designer and then find it impossible to keep said website current. This can be due to the ongoing designer costs or poor DIY handover information.
It just about breaks my heart, because websites are such a crucial part of the marketing process and enhancing your businesses growth.
I've been focusing on the importance of having a plan when posting to social media platforms in recent weeks, but what it’s just as crucial - if not more so - is how imperative it is to have somewhere for your customers to go next.
This is where a website comes in.
A website is the best opportunity you have in moving your ideal customer closer to your products/services and in turn, closer to a sale.
This often starts in social media land. Whatever your preferred platform, you are there to make connections and introduce yourself and your business to your ideal customer. But when they’re ready to know more, you need somewhere to send them to make the sale - this is where your website comes in!
So you send them over to your website - but not to just any page, but rather a very specific page on your website that will encourage further action.
And this action should encourage them to exchange their email address with you for some juicy free value. Meet my old buddy, the Lead Magnet.
Lead magnets are a fabulous tool for moving your audience further down the pipeline towards a sale, by offering them tangible value in exchange for more direct access to them, i.e. through their inbox. A lead magnet can be anything that provides free value to your potential client whilst giving them a taste at how valuable your services/product will be. E.g. a 30-min discovery call, an ebook or a how-to guide.
A great example of this is my 5 Day Website Challenge. This moves people from my socials over to my website. They provide their email address which means I have insight to their interests as well as permission to utilise future email marketing to introduce other products or services that might interest them.
They get access to a FREE guided program for building their own small business website. And I get to keep them in the loop via email for upcoming promotions & opportunities to work with me.
Social media should be a spoke in the marketing wheel - it shouldn’t be THE WHEEL.
Social media platforms change frequently and without warning; if you’re solely dependant on them for doing business, you run the risk of being completely cut off from potential & paying customers. As an example, the sale of live animals/animal products is now prohibited on Facebook, a big hit for all my farming clients.
But by actively using social media to send potential customers to your website, and then having tools sitting on your website that ask for their contact details in exchange for value, you’re creating opportunities to create points of constant contact with them outside the whimsical decisions of the social tech overlords.
And even when a potential customer is on your email marketing radar, your website is where you will continually send them back to - for booking your services, information on products, to view galleries or check out your latest blog post. It really can be the salesman who never sleeps.
So you can see why an up-to-date website is crucial to your customers journey as well as enhancing and growing your small business. My experience with past and present clients has led me to developing a guided workshop that will help you develop and maintain your own website - I can’t wait to bring you more information on this in the coming weeks.